


the world no longer drowned

by magdaliny



Series: to win back what you lost [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Amnesia, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Psychological Trauma, standard Winter Soldier trauma umbrella
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-25
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-05-23 02:16:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6101473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magdaliny/pseuds/magdaliny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even if recovery was linear, there still wouldn't be a map.</p><p>Who could have drawn it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Lowland Hum's [_War Is Over_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9AK-iOtF4Y).

The coffin looks so small in the earth.

One by one, people come forward to throw a handful of dirt. Sometimes it lands soft. Sometimes it thumps, clatters. Clods and rocks. You try not to flinch. Some people linger, others turn away like they've been slapped. Some of the women wear short veils. You didn't think people still did that. Steve, at your side, nudges you.

But when you look up, it isn't Steve.

“Well?” says Peggy. “Aren't you going to?”

“I don't think I have the right,” you say. “I barely remember you. You barely remembered me when I visited.”

“We were not bosom friends,” Peggy agrees. She flickers, badly tuned. Her hair is white; her hair is brown. Her lips are red; her lips are bare. She slips her hand under your arm. She says, “But we have something in common, don't we?”

“He misses you,” you say. “He misses you so goddamn much, Carter, there ain't even words.”

“I missed him for sixty-eight years,” she says. She looks down at the coffin. “I suppose if I was the vindictive sort, I'd say I got a little of my own back.”

“He'll miss you for a hundred.” It chokes you; tender in the throat. Your voice comes up thin, high. “He'll miss you for his whole life.”

“Come along,” says Peggy. She tugs your elbow, but you plant yourself.

“I'm scared,” you say.

Peggy smiles—red, bare, red, bare—and pulls you forward like you weigh nothing. You almost lose your balance. You only have one arm. Or: your other arm is dangling useless.

“Come on, Brooklyn,” she says. She called you that once, somewhere. A flash of light, a match, a cigarette. Rain on the command tent. Irritation. No: anger. _Don't start fights you can't finish, Brooklyn_. You hear a dog, barking. She pulls you until your feet hit the edge of the hole. “It's only a little death,” she says.

“Death's never little,” you try to say. You open your mouth, but nothing comes out. The world is too bright. A dog, barking, barking.

You make a frustrated animal noise, and then: you're in your body. You open your eyes to Josie's big mournful stare. Her wet nose on your nose. She whuffs kibble breath on your face when you startle, and then she trots away. You rub your eyes without lifting your head. Elsewhere, Clara is still barking. You hear Steve's bare feet and his voice, low, stern: _hey_. You come awake in pieces: sight, thought, scent. You smell coffee. Something cooking.

You remember what you have to do today. You groan and shove your head under your pillow.

You can't hear Steve moving around anymore, but you know when he comes in. Your body always knows. Something in the way the floor shifts. The way the air moves. He crawls fully clothed into your side of the bed, where there's no room; you're already reaching for him. His foot on your ankle. His knees between your knees. He tucks his head under your pillow too.

“Hey,” you say. You touch his throat.

“Hey,” says Steve. His eyes are red. They've been red for days. “I made breakfast.”

“Smells good,” you say. “What was the hullabaloo?”

“Sam's here. He buzzed the balcony.”

You nod. You don't ask how Steve is doing. He's been asked that enough. Besides, you can hear a Rudy Vallee record playing in the living room. That tells you everything you need to know.

“Up and at 'em, tiger,” says Steve. Steady, under his red-rimmed eyes. “Your big day.”

You put your whole hand over Steve's face, grumpily. You feel him smile into your palm. Just the corner of his mouth, shifting against your skin. You move your hand to the side of his neck so you can see it.

“What time is it?”

“6:20ish.”

You make a face, but you throw the blankets off your shoulders. You push them down to the foot of the bed with your toes so you can't change your mind. Steve reaches for the prosthetic on the night-table. You shake your head.

“Tony wants to fit me before we go,” you say. The greyhounds come trotting in on their skittery deer legs. In tandem, side by side. Steve calls it their cart-horse trick. Clara takes one look at your naked legs and peels off, heading for Steve instead. “Prude,” you say. You dodge Josie on your way to the shower. She parks herself on the bathmat like a sphinx.

Steve is dead to the world when you come out. You and the dogs tiptoe into the hall. You, silent. The girls, click-click-click.

 

* * *

 

“Sir,” says JARVIS, “Major Wilson is approaching the suite. Shall I open the door for him?”

“Please,” you say. 

You go out to meet Sam, your finger on your lips. Sam puts his suitcase down and waves; signs: _Sorry I couldn't get here last night. Layover in D-E-N-V-E-R_. You flick your hands out in front of you: _no problem_. You direct Sam to the kitchen and close the door.

“Food's in the slow cooker,” you say. You hand Sam a plate and return to your own breakfast.

“Steve's asleep?” Sam asks. He lifts the lid and makes an appreciative noise. When Steve makes a breakfast casserole, he doesn't fuck around.

You make a noise around your mouthful: hang on. Once you swallow: “Yeah, thank god. I'd say he got up early to make that, except I'm not sure he actually went to bed.”

Sam winces as he brings his food to the table. Josie lays down adoringly on his feet. “When are the Traoré kids getting here?”

“Aimee's got a session with Steve at ten,” you say. “Mariam's asleep—spare bedroom. You're the study buddy today, if you can handle it.”

“No prob. Is Doc coming over after?”

“Yeah,” you say, “Movie night,” and don't tease Sam about his massive, unsubtle crush on Djenebou Traoré. You're a good friend. Also, you think it might be mutual. Just a hunch. Joking with yourself. Really: Djene looks at Sam the way Steve used to look at you, when he thought you couldn't see him.

“And how are _you_ doing?” says Sam.

You're saved from answering by two things. First, Mariam stumbles into the kitchen moaning “ _coffee..._ ” like the med school zombie she is. Then, Tony's disembodied voice: “Shake a leg, Robocop, daylight's burning!”

You salute the ceiling and scamper.

 

* * *

 

You peek out through a gap in the curtain. There must be a thousand people in the auditorium, packed like sardines all the way into the aisles and out the doors. The security staff are pulling extra chairs from somewhere. You hope they're following the fire codes.

“Remind me,” you say, “Why I'm doing this again?”

“Because you love me,” says Tony.

“I really, really don't.”

“You do, though.” Tony fusses with his collar like it isn't already perfect. “You told me so, at hilarious length, that one time we managed to get you drunk. Unless you were lying to me. You wouldn't lie to me, would you, Barnes?” You open your mouth. Tony keeps talking. “Anyway, let's be real, you have this overwhelming affection for all living things, don't bother denying it, I have multiple recordings of the facial expression you make every time DUM-E kills a spider.”

You're trying to figure out where to _start_ with that when Dr. Traoré walks in, wearing a white knee-length dress with a big skirt. Pleats and lace, and little cap sleeves. Her usual running blades have been replaced: they look like real legs, if real legs could be made out of cobwebs. Impossibly delicate, like spun sugar. They sparkle. You think you're staring.

“Oh thank god,” says Tony. “Pet him or something, he's about to vibrate out of his skin and I need to go find the interns.”

“Oops, I forgot my tranq gun,” says Djene. She hugs you: her easy affection. You have to lean down a little to hug her back. She's shorter without the blades.

“You look beautiful, Doc,” you say when she pulls back.

“I look like an old lady wearing her daughter's prom dress.”

Your snort is loud enough to startle a sound tech. “You don't look a day over thirty.”

She grins. “Black don't crack.”

You gesture at the legs. “Tony showing off?”

“Actually, these are Ruth's baby. Hot off the printer last night—don't worry, we stress-tested them within an inch of their lives.” She executes a little shimmy-step. “ _Tony_ wanted to put me in the bird legs, but I said, honey, the way I muck about in those, I'll break James's ankles.”

“Thanks for not doing that.”

Djene looks around. She tugs you a little, out of the way. She says, quieter: “How was the funeral?”

You take a deep breath. Let it out.

“Good,” you say, and: “I think—I think she would've hated it.” You mean it to be uncertain. It comes out more like a confession. “A lot of pomp, and. At least it wasn't televised.”

“Any trouble?”

“Just a lot of confiscated cameras.”

Djene, quieter still: “And Steve?”

Your mouth tugs to the side. She looks at you, and then she shakes her head.

You weren't expecting how tore up Steve would be. After all, it wasn't exactly sudden. But, in retrospect, you aren't surprised. It's just—Carter was the last. Everyone else is gone, except for you, and you're still missing pieces: still missing half your life. You remember the war better than your childhood. You don't have much before the factory, or after the train. You've learned to be okay with that; you had to. So did Steve. But it's one thing to know it, and another thing to be reminded without warning. Lightning out of a blue sky.

And some days, hell. It seemed like Carter was going to live forever.

“He'll be okay,” you say.

Djene nods. Sympathy, soft, in all the lines around her eyes. “You know what they say about time and wounds," she says. Lighter: “He's got my spawn to take care of him, after all.”

“A truly terrifying motivator,” you say, flat, and she cackles.

Then she leans back and gives you a Look. You know she can't MRI you with her eyes, but your brain has a hard time believing it. You cave immediately.

“I'm kind of nervous,” you admit.

“You'll be fine. We only practised about nine thousand times. My favourite badass, remember?”

You don't feel much like a badass. You feel the way you did when you were in withdrawal, the year you came home. Knock-kneed and a little clammy, like you've caught the flu.

“I wish Steve was here,” you say. “He's always been good at working the crowds.”

“He wasn't born that way,” says Djene. “It takes a lot of work. He told me he used to put his lines on the back of his shield.”

You think, gleefully: I am going to tease him about that forever.

“Do you—” Djene starts, and someone calls, “Dr. Traoré!” at the same moment your phone vibrates. It's Sam. You show her the screen. “Take it, I've got to deal with this,” she says, and walks away on her sparkling legs.

You look around. You shouldn't answer here. The techs are setting up audio and Tony will make sad engineer faces at you. You look out the door, but the halls are full of people. You reject the call.

 _Hang on_ , you text Sam, and take the stairs to the basement. There's a set of dingy, unused bathrooms down there. You found them when Tony sent you to look for a janitor's closet to pilfer. Tony said he needed duct tape, but he was probably just trying to keep you occupied.

You lock the door behind yourself and call Sam back. His warm voice in your ear. You assumed it was going to calm you down, but you feel like you're winding up tighter. A spring in your stomach, compressing.

“Yo. How's it hanging?”

“I think I'm about to have a meltdown in a bathroom,” you say.

“Well, get outta there. What's eating you?”

“ _Everything_.”

“Okay,” says Sam, “I can work with that. One, you got this, you're a natural, you could do this in your sleep. Two, Tony is going to be doing, like, 110% of the talking. Three, even if someone picks on you during the Q&A, which they _won't_ , nobody's gonna expect you to provide a sound bite for the company. You're the nerdy tech guy, not—well, Tony. Four, Doc's gonna be _right there_ , seriously, that woman makes you look smarter by sheer proximity. Also she'll probably pinch you if you start hyperventilating. That just about cover it?”

“Stop being so good at this,” you hiss.

“Sorry. Want me to try again?”

“No.”

“Come on, man. Spill. I can practically hear your gears grinding.”

“Gross,” someone says, kind of tinny, like they're just out of range of the speakerphone. Clint, you realize. You didn't know Clint was coming over. But then: Sam and Clint are kind of attached at the hip. “Come on, Barnes, tell us how you grind your gears.”

“Excuse me,” says Sam. You hear a series of muffled thumps. The smack of a hand against someone's skin. A shout: mock-angry. If previous wrestling matches are anything to go by, Sam is probably sitting on Clint. You lean forward and let your forehead hit the wall next to the paper towel dispenser.

“Okay,” says Sam. “Do continue.”

Grudgingly, half-scared you'll make it come true by thinking it: “What if somebody recognizes me?”

“Dude,” says Sam. “You're a white guy with brown hair and a beard. At a goddamn science conference. Slouch a little, and nobody's even gonna know you're _there_.”

You squint at the mirror.

The longer your hair is, the more curl it seems to get. You haven't cut it in ages, and it's past your shoulders. Your beard isn't long, but it's pretty thick. (You think it makes you look like a tough biker. Steve says you look like a gay lumberjack.) There are lines, mostly around your eyes, that weren't there when you fell. You're wearing what you think of as old-man frames and everyone else calls hipster glasses.

You think: maybe Sam's right. You definitely don't look like the Winter Soldier. The Soldier was too thin under the bulk, the artificial strength. Malnourished. Grey. Slack mouth, wide eyes. A dropped glass: empty, but something stuck in the cracks. The residue of fear. The Soldier moved like a tiger always waiting for a gun.

But you remember photographs from before, reels and albums and collections on the internet—scraps of film, moments in motion, a soft-eyed boy turned brittle—and think: you also couldn't look less like Sergeant James Barnes if you tried.

One long, slow breath out, from the bottom of your lungs.

“There you go,” says Sam. “G'wan, listen to some Serena Ryder, put your game face on, knock 'em dead.”

“Thanks, Wilson,” you say drily, but Sam knows you mean it.

“What am I, chopped liver?” says Clint. Presumably from the floor.

“You got some words of wisdom, Barton?”

“Yeah. Don't do anything I would.”

“Don't lead with my face, remember my pants, ingest actual calories before noon, got it,” you say. You hang up the phone on Clint's outraged squawk and Sam's laughter.

You still feel sweaty-palmed, but the laughing helps. Carl once told you that laughter convinces your brain that everything is okay. Nobody laughs in a life-or-death combat situation. People laugh when they're comfortable. You thought it was bullshit, but Djene confirmed it was a thing.

“Some people play podcasts all day to trick their brains into feeling safe,” she told you. “If humans are talking normally, the world can't possibly be ending, right?”

Which, if nothing else, explained a lot about Steve's radio habits.

You give yourself another minute to come to ground. Just the way Sam taught you in Clint's apartment. Buddha Belly: round inhale, empty exhale. Breathing all the tension out of your limbs. Sam's right. You are going to be fine. You open your eyes. You strike the Wonder Woman pose in the mirror.

And then you haul ass back up the stairs.

You find Djene waiting in the wings, straight-backed. Looking out at the audience with a faint smile. You envy her serenity. She reaches for you; fixes your tie, the lay of your rolled-up cuffs. You aren't wearing your faux-skin cover. All your machinery is exposed. Out on the stage, you can hear Tony grandstanding: “—demonstration of the recent advancements we've made to—”

The music starts to build.

“Let's bring the house down,” says Djenebou Traoré, and you step out into the lights.

 

* * *

 

During the planning process, you were kidnapped by a committee. Djene, Pepper, Natalia, Darcy, Ruth the Intern. And you. (Steve teased you about the way you keep finding yourself locked in rooms with powerful women. You told Steve he was just jealous.) One by one, they pitched and discarded ideas. The foxtrot: too fast. The tango: too ambitious. Also, said Darcy, too sexy. The ба́рыня: too dangerous for your cover. The cha-cha: too much footwork. It had to be something Djene could manage with unfamiliar limbs and something that wouldn't make you embarrass yourself.

Which explains how you've found yourself waltzing with your neurologist on camera.

Tony's sped up the music slightly, for which you will pinch him later. Now, though: Djene is floating. You feel like a stumbling oaf next to her. At least, you think, most people will be watching her instead of you. You go tentatively into the first spin, but Djene pivots on her spun sugar feet like she's been wearing them her whole life. She raises her eyebrows: _is that all you've got, Barnes?_ You pick up your pace.

When the music winds down, you dip Djene towards the audience. Hair in your eyes, your left hand in the small of her back, her feet between yours. The roar of sound startles you. You tug her up so you don't drop her. There are people standing up, applauding. Someone wolf-whistles in the back.

“Smile!” Djene yells into your ear. “You look like a slapped cod!”

You smile. You bow. It feels mechanical, strange. Djene hauls you into a second one. Somewhere to your right, Tony is saying, “That was great, wasn't it, thank you, let's give everyone a minute to cool down while we set up the—” and you don't hear the rest, because Djene is pulling you into the wings.

“Supersoldiers,” she gripes, fanning herself. There's sweat on her temples, her throat. Your skin is dry. “Give me your handkerchief, I know you've got one, you old fashioned bastard. Thank you.”

Ruth runs up with water bottles while Djene's patting herself carefully, trying not to smudge her screen makeup. Mohan is on Ruth's heels with Djene's usual legs. They've perfected the intern-scurry. Tony must be so proud. If only, you think mournfully, you could teach either of them to make coffee that doesn't come out of a Keurig or a Starbucks. You shoo them off and help Djene switch legs yourself. Her small, strong hand on your shoulder as she balances on one blade. Petticoats in your face. You thumb the vacuum switch and step back. Djene bounces experimentally along the wings: walking on the moon.

“That's better,” Djene sighs. She grabs your elbows and gives you a little shake. Bright eyes. “I don't need to say it, but I'm going to anyway: hot damn, Barnes. You dance like that with Steve and he'll be eating out of your palm.”

“Already does.” But you're grinning. “You were fantastic, Doc. You're gonna be viral by the weekend, guaranteed.”

She blows a loud raspberry. “Shall we?” She offers her elbow.

“Let's,” you say.

While you've been in the wings, the techs have moved two long tables onto the stage, a microphone perched in front of every chair. Everyone else is already there. Tony stands as you approach, clapping. The audience claps with him.

The placard in front of your mic reads _Jim Bauer_. Only Tony and Djene know your real name; this one has been your cover since your first month in the Tower. The interns might find out, someday, but Tony is very security-conscious; he can't guarantee their silence forever. You don't mind. Jim Bauer's papers have received moderate praise from industry journals. Jim Bauer has a boyfriend and two cats. A nice guy. You don't mind playing him on TV—so to speak.

When the audience settles, Tony says, “Great, welcome! Again! This is the boring part, unless you're _really_ interested in microelectrode arrays. The nice people in white shirts will be passing microphones around the room—let's have some questions that aren't about everybody's marital status this time, okay?” Warm laughter from the room. “Before we get started, let me introduce Ruth Schaeffer and Mohan Gupta, this year's interns; I'm—oh, who am I kidding, you all know who I am—that's Jim Bauer, one of our technicians; and Dr. Djenebou Traoré, neurosurgeon. Our home team includes engineers, robotics specialists, medical consultants, and prosthetic makeup artists, but you get the blue light special this afternoon. Right, first question—”

A young woman in the back stands up. Someone hands her a microphone. “In your most recent press release, you stated that your primary goal is to make assistive technology more accessible. Can you elaborate?”

“That's going to need a twofold answer,” says Tony, and it begins.

 _What is your distribution plan for developing countries?_ is followed by _How do you respond to the anti-transhumanist criticism directed at your company by David Lindskold?_ is followed by _Where do you stand in regards to the Smalley-Drexter debate on molecular nanotechnology?_ is followed by _How will you lower production costs?_ Tony talks about the Joseph Rogers Foundation for veterans in need of prosthetics. Djene breaks down biosensors and electroactive polymers into simple terms. Mohan talks about his doctorate research on combining photostatic veils with semiconducting silicone. Ruth shyly explains the mechanisms of integrated 3D printing.

You think: my team. Making the world a better place to live. You glow with it.

You're so distracted by pride that you almost miss the next question.

“How much is ease of use accounted for in your designs?”

“You want to take that one, Jim?” Tony asks.

 _No_ , you think, but you lean forward. Clear your throat. “We've made that a priority,” you say. You try the light touch, hoping for a laugh: “Who wants to spend fifteen minutes putting their legs on in the morning?” Scattered chuckles. You feel braver. “The model I'm wearing has a biometric lock under a panel. Approved fingerprints disconnect the ports, and—” You twist and pull: less than ten seconds. Under it, your false stump is realistically lumpy. Shiny with silicone scar tissue. “There. Easier than opening a pickle jar.”

“Attachment depends on the individual's accessibility needs, physical ability, anatomical condition, and preference,” says Djene, saving you. You shoot her a grateful look as you reattach your arm. She adds: “I don't require much neurological feedback, for example, so my attachment points are glorified suction cups. Jim needs to be able to manipulate delicate machinery, but permanent installation would make it more difficult for him to field-test multiple limbs, so he uses ports. One of our medical consultants chose osseointegration because she doesn't have the fine motor control necessary in her opposite hand to remove the limb at will. And so on.”

A girl near the front says, “So you actively test—”

The sound, you realize later, is an explosion.

Glass rains down on the audience. Screaming. Light, suddenly: from the broken skylights, the hole in the roof. Concrete dust in the air. Someone shouts _hit the deck!_ Microphone feedback like kettles shrieking.

There is a man floating in the middle of the room.

You realize you're standing. So is Tony. So is Djene. The interns are under the table, where they should be. Where Djene should be. You want to reach out for her, but you're frozen. The world contracts. Like looking through a tube. Echoes. Everything is too loud.

 _Mr. Stark!_ the man yells down. He's wearing all black: black turtleneck, black jeans, black boots. His hair is blonde, curly. Floating around his head. A breeze from the open roof, or he's making it himself. Handsome, if he wasn't sneering. Twisting his face like wax. The man says: _I'd like to talk about the Avengers._

 _You missed a memo, Clark Kent_ , says Tony. _I haven't been an Avenger since 2017._

 _Exactly_ , the man says, and pulls out a gun.

Something deep in your brain reports: _Beretta 8357, recoil operated, 11-round magazine_ , and the man's untrained grip. Finger already on the trigger. Undisciplined. If he doesn't shoot Tony on purpose he'll shoot someone else by accident. You don't know how much of the man's concentration is taken up by floating. You don't know anything. Floundering, where you should be taking control.

But you're frozen.

 _Get under the table_ , says Tony. _Jim, now_.

You can't.

 _James, get your goddamn head down_ , says Djene. She's doing something with her right arm. You see a flash of gold.

Everything is very loud. But: quiet in your head. You can hear your own breath. Loud, in your ears. Close. Like you're in a very small space. Your heartbeat: fast. It feels like it's coming from far away. Someone else's pulse racing.

“ _Down!_ ” Djene snarls. She hip-checks you. She and Tony put up their arms at the same moment. Gauntlets around their palms. Her body hitting yours jerks you into yourself, into the world, which is not small, which is not calm. Like a crash: yelling, feedback, a subwoofer rumble. Two repulsors firing at once. You drop like your strings have been cut. Mohan's wide eyes under the table, Ruth reaching for you like a child. The gun: _bang! bang! bang!_ Ruth flinches with her whole body. Someone is screaming but it isn't her. You crawl over her—over them both. You get Mohan's head under your body. You cover Ruth's spine with your arm.

Something falls on the table from above. Collapses it. You feel yourself shout but you can't hear it. Pain. And then: less pain. Someone steps off the table. Black jeans, black boots. You dive for his legs and take him to the ground. He spins like a crocodile under you, wild. He pistol-whips you across the face. You hear something crack. Rookie mistake. He should have shot you right between the eyes.

You crush his hand, gun and all.

 

* * *

 

Tony finds you in the janitor's closet.

You can't see who comes in and shuts the door, but you know it's Tony. Djene would be quieter: rubber pads on her blades. You're holding your legs. Forehead pressed against your knees. When Tony sits down beside you, his own knees click. You mumble into your dress pants: “How did you know I'd be here?”

“Honestly? It's where I'd be.”

You press your face harder into your kneecaps.

“Please don't tell Steve I hurt somebody,” you whisper.

“No can do, Sarge,” says Tony. “What I _can_ do, though, is tell him you saved a bunch of people from a maniac with a gun and a gravity problem. Myself included. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty grateful when someone's a hero. So, you know. Better to own it.”

You don't want to hurt anybody. You promised yourself you wouldn't, not again, not for any reason. You don't want violence to live in your body. You don't want to remember the crunch, the grinding under your fingers. You don't want to remember the noise the man made. Animal-frightened: like you were killing him. “I don't want—” you say, and your throat closes up around the rest.

“I know, kiddo,” says Tony. His arm snakes heavy over your shoulders. He pulls you into his side. You tilt and almost unbalance, but Tony is solid, more solid than he looks in his smooth jacket, his rumpled tie. “I know. It'd be nice if the world worked like that. I hate that have to weaponize my briefcases, Barnes, you have no idea, it's so hard on the leather. But—I'd rather do it, knowing I'm keeping my people safe, instead of not doing it because I hate why I have to. I'm glad you were on the team today. Okay?”

That is just. Far too nice for you to deal with right now. “Don't call me kiddo,” you mutter, so you don't do anything embarrassing. “I'm like eighty years older than you.”

“Call me when you hit biological forty, then we'll talk,” says Tony. “Hey, I hate to rush a guy through an existential crisis and/or panic attack, but the cops are going to be here literally any second now, and I need your arm.”

That brings your head up. Tony winces at whatever he sees. “Oh, yikes. There goes your shot on the pageant circuit.”

You let him manhandle your prosthetic into his lap. “What are you doing?”

“I'm removing the limiters on your grip strength. I mean, I doubt they're going to, but _if_ they ask how mild-mannered Stark technician Jim Bauer managed to crumple a gun like a soda can, well, here you go. By the by, they didn't catch your supersoldiering on any of the cameras. As far as I can tell, you two were totally hidden behind the table. Heaven, small miracles, etcetera.”

“Why did he want to shoot you?”

Tony grimaces and stops moving his tools in your arm. He lets a long breath out through his nose. “On a lot of drugs, by the sounds of it. He, uh—he lost his sister, during the Battle of New York, he was convinced I could've saved her and didn't. Apparently I blew right past her, and. I guess he didn't know he could fly at the time? It was probably his break-through...crisis...thing.”

“Could you?” you ask. He looks up. “Have saved her?”

Tony doesn't break eye contact, but you can tell he isn't seeing you. You think he's seeing something else: rubble and monsters and a hole in the sky. You saw the pictures online. The videos, once, and then never again. They gave you nightmares and you weren't even there.

Tony's lips compress and relax. Quick, like a flinch.

“I don't know,” he says. “Probably never will. A lot of people died while we were doing other things. Saving other people. So—he could be totally right, actually. 100% on the money.” Something clicks, deep in your forearm. Tony closes the plate. “But that doesn't give him any right to wave a gun around in a conference hall and try to murder me, so. You still did the right thing. Okay? You did the right thing.”

The crunch, the grind. Shrieking. You close your eyes. You open them.

“Okay,” you say. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

You're worried about exposure, but you don't have to be. Jim Bauer is a real boy; your cover story holds up. Cordons keep sightseers out. Cameras inside get reviewed. Tony's media team chokes the reporters as much as they can, and downplays what they can't, while the police aren't enthusiastic about sharing details. They're sympathetic, even warm, but. Unhappy. Tense. Enhanced people going off the rails always make the public nervous. Nobody wants another repeat of 2017. Or, worse: 2018, and the Registration Riots.

Still, you don't know what you're going to come home to.

You open the door to JARVIS's quiet “welcome home, sir,” and faint music. No television. No whispers. Before you can make it two steps down the hall, Sam and Clint appear. They make a barricade.

“Holy shit,” says Clint. Sam elbows him. “I mean, uh, glad you're okay. Ow? Do you want, like, a steak?”

“We haven't told Steve yet,” Sam says, all business, “But social media's imploded. 'Tony Stark attacked at prosthetics conference in Manhattan!' 'Who is the Iron Lady?' There's pictures of all of you, man. How do you want to do this?”

“I'll—” You shake your head. “I'll tell him.”

“You want backup?”

“No. I'll—this is better.”

Sam doesn't look convinced, but he lets you pass.

You follow the music to the living room. Steve and Aimee are in front of the window. Steve, face-down on a massage table. Aimee on her angled drafting stool. Her hand on her belly when she reaches for ink. Both of them facing away, towards New York, where the sun is beginning to set, orange fire-light on steel and glass. The loud buzz of the tattoo machine. You can tell she's shading from the tempo: shorter, rounder sounds. You take off your coat.

“Hey, Bear,” says Aimee.

“Hey, Bird.” You don't come any closer. You want to keep this moment a little longer. A capsule of your life. Your people. Your doors, your windows, your walls. You've never hurt a soul here. Nobody has. A history of kindness, soaked into the hardwood. You want to lay down on the floor and drown in it. You want to lay down, full stop.

The dogs come up and sniff your shirt cuffs. All the hands you shook. The one you crushed. Gunpowder residue, probably. Blood, even though you washed like Lady Macbeth. Clara looks unimpressed. Josie sneezes on your prosthetic.

You come a little closer to see what Aimee's working on. For a moment, you wish you hadn't. Not that it isn't good; it is, it's very good. If you didn't know Aimee was only an apprentice, you wouldn't be able to tell. But then, she's had a lot of practice. Monochrome and sharp: the Howlies and Howard, true to life, faces spread across Steve's back like an old posed photograph. And Carter. Framed by the men, right in the middle, right on Steve's spine. On Steve's left shoulderblade, Dernier is already starting to fade. It's how you know where Aimee must have started. Time, as measured by Steve's cell turnover. They'll all be gone by morning.

You swallow.

“Beautiful,” you say. “Have you seen it, Stevie?”

“Mmmyeah,” Steve mumbles into his own elbow. The buzz of the tiny motor in Aimee's hand almost drowns him out.

“Don't mind him, he's in endorphin-town. Is Mom with you? How was the conference?” Aimee's hand, moving. Strong firm strokes, ink pooling over Carter's throat.

“Eventful,” you say. “Don't freak out.”

Because Aimee is a professional, she coils the wire around her thumb and lifts the machine before she looks at you. Quizzical, and then: horrified. “Oh my _god_ , Bucky!” She almost falls off her drafting stool. Eight months pregnant; her balance is off. Different centre of gravity. You reach for her, but she's already in your space, grabbing your arms, your jaw. The machine clatters to the floor. Steve is trying to sit up. Swaying, drunkenly, at the edge of the table. You know when his vision focuses, because he makes a horrible gut-punched noise.

“I'm okay, I'm okay,” you hear yourself saying. “I'm okay, there was an incident, but everyone's okay—”

You're shivering. Quaking like a goddamn aspen. Like your body waited until you were safe to give up on you.

Steve manages to get off the table. He stands: wobbly like a colt. You catch his elbows when he stumbles. It's just one step, but he stumbles. His breath comes out in a startled _whumph_ when he drops his head to your shoulder. Your legs threaten to buckle. The two of you: can't stand on your own feet. You widen your stance and brace yourself just before Steve flings his arms around your neck. You almost grab him before you remember the tattoo. You cradle the back of his head with one hand instead. Rest the other on the base of his spine.

“What happened?” Aimee asks. Her fingers twist together over her belly. Black nitrile gloves. The back of her left hand shiny with petroleum jelly.

You breathe in. You breathe out.

“Enhanced kid busted in through the roof, looking for Tony,” you say. “He had a gun.” Steve makes a noise you can't interpret. “I had a chance to take him down, so I did.”

Aimee bites her bottom lip. “Did you—?”

You shake your head. “I just, I broke his—” A hysterical sound comes out of your mouth. “I broke his hand real bad, he might need a—a prosthetic—” You have to hide your face in Steve's neck. It's not laughing. It's not crying, either. You don't know what your body is doing.

“Oh, Bear,” Aimee whispers. Her hand on your head.

You remember meeting the Traoré girls for the first time. While you were recuperating, building the first arm. Willowy Malian track-and-field queens, both certain their sister was the most uncool. Aimee hitting the end of her growth spurt; Mariam just starting hers. Bonding over handsome movie stars and not much else. It was an accident, meeting them: you weren't supposed to be there. You were supposed to be with Tony, but Tony came down with something, spiked a fever right in the lab. The flu that year kicked like a horse. You practically had to carry Tony to his suite.

The girls weren't supposed to be there either. Djene was called in while she was picking them up from school. Emergency brain surgery, a helicoptor landing on the roof of the Tower. It wasn't the first time Steve had volunteered to keep an eye on them; you knew because he told you. He was their favourite. Still, you came home and it startled you. Two teenage girls in your kitchen. Three mugs of hot chocolate. The handmade marshmallows Steve liked to buy from a tiny shop in Hell's Kitchen. Textbooks on the floor. Steve saying: “No, my team was special, all the other units were segregated until—” and he looked up. “Buck, hey!” And then he smacked his hand over his mouth. Security clearances for the Traoré girls, after that.

You remember stealing Steve's cocoa and saying, “Has he told you about the time he tried to stop a tank with his face?” and Steve growling, faux-angry: “Of _course_ you remember that.” You remember Mariam telling you she was going to be a doctor like her momma. You remember Aimee, squeaky and quiet but not at all shy: “Can I braid your hair?” Just babies. History reports and fashion magazines on the kitchen table. You remember six months later, when Aimee escaped from her first disaster of a date and cried on your knees for an hour.

“Boys are dumb,” you told her.

“ _You're_ dating a boy,” she mumbled.

“Yeah,” you said. Your hand on her cornrows. “Which is why I'm an authority on boys being dumb.”

Now: Aimee's fingers in your hair. Steve's breath on your neck. Sam and Clint in the doorway.

“Hey, Sugar Ray,” says Sam. His voice loud, easy. Pretending everything is normal. You love Sam the best. “Let's go sort out that face of yours before it sticks that way.”

Steve and Aimee step back. Steve kisses your temple before he lets you go. It's as far as either of you are comfortable taking things in public. Steve, retaining his old-fashioned propriety. At least, that's what everyone thinks. Steve lets them believe whatever they want. He knows anything more makes you feel too vulnerable at the best of times. This? Not the best of times.

You follow Sam to the bathroom and sit on the counter. Sam wets a washcloth with hot water and presses it to your face. You replace his hand with your own and sigh. It feels good. The air is warm, moist; someone has had a shower in here recently. Your shivers recede a little.

“I'm surprised they let you go, looking like that,” says Sam. “Broken cheekbone?”

“Cracked,” you amend. “I told them my roommate was a nurse.” You didn't, really. Tony told the paramedics he was taking you to Stark Medical. Both of you knew it wasn't going to happen. But: Sam's unimpressed face is your favourite Sam face.

“Hilarious. That's gonna need stitches, funny guy. What happened?”

“He hit me with his gun.”

“Instead of _shooting_ you?”

“I got the feeling,” you say, looking away, “He wasn't all that experienced.”

Sam grabs your chin and turns you. The smell of disinfectant burns your sinuses before he swipes it across your face. You hiss.

“Barnes, if I've learned anything from doing this job, it's that some days, you get the megalomaniacal supervillain who legit wants to see the world burn, and some days you get the shit-scared fourteen-year-old who just wants to get back at the bullies. Either way, you still gotta stop them before they hurt anybody.”

You don't say anything. You look at your knees until Sam says, “Hey.” You glance at him. “What were you thinking when you went for him? Like, your exact thought process?”

“I thought he was going to hurt the interns,” you say. As it comes out of your mouth, you only feel worse. You realize: you put them in more danger by engaging the man. They would have been safer if you had stayed under the table. If the man had managed to incapacitate you, he would have known exactly where they were. He could have had hostages. You feel sick.

“ _Hey_ ,” says Sam, and snaps his fingers. You startle. Sam points at your eyes, and then back to his. He signs, so you can't look away: _Your first instinct was protecting those kids. Nothing else matters_. His hands are terse. He cuts the air.

“Would it matter if I'd killed him?” you ask.

“Maybe,” Sam allows. “But you didn't, so let's not argue what-ifs. And honestly? Barnes? From what I understand, that guy had a fucking gun and the intent to harm civilians. A _gun_. In a _theatre_. I was in your place? I mighta done a lot more than just breaking his hand.”

You let out the breath you're holding. Out: longer than you expect. Like you have air stored away in all the hollows of your body. You feel empty, but. A little cleaner.

“Okay?” Sam asks.

“Tony gave me the same talk,” you say. And then, lying through your teeth: “I hate that you all know me so well.”

Sam sees right through you. Grins.

“Stupid's predictable,” says Sam, and squishes your cheeks like a horrible aunt. “Now, stay still, I want to make sure you set that nose right.”

 

* * *

 

In the end, you accept four butterfly bandages and an ice pack. When you sit down at the kitchen table, Mariam's entire contribution for the evening is looking up from her gross anatomy textbook, saying: “Jesus wept,” and then turning the page. Mariam is still largely too cool for you. Or too preoccupied. You can't tell anymore. Kids these days.

Sam hustles everyone else out of the suite, himself included. (Mariam hums _We Shall Not Be Moved_ at a menacing tempo when Sam gets within ten feet of her. Sam is a man with a good sense of self-preservation.) Aimee is on the phone with Djene as she goes through the door, and you hear: “I don't _care_ if you had a repulsor, Mom, what were you going to do, stop the bullet with your _hand_?” You have a moment of deja-vu.

When the door shuts, Steve kisses you properly. Careful hands on your face: thumbs below your eyes, hovering over your bruises. Your hands come to rest on his hips. You can feel the texture of his shirt with all ten of your fingertips. Eight months ago, you and Tony stumbled upon a myoelectrical integration circuit that changed everything. It lights up your artificial nerves like Times Square. You spent four days touching everything in the apartment. Speechless. Overwhelmed.

In bed, you curl up fetal against Steve's side. His chin on your head, his hands on your spine. You feel like one body. A spiral of blood-warm skin. It's better in Spanish, you think: _caracol_. The word itself feels small, tucked-up. You want to hide in this shell for as long as you can. The only thing you can hear is Steve's heartbeat, his pulse against your ear. Your world narrows down to the whisper of blood in someone else's veins.

Sleep is slow in coming, but it does come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dance scene, to the surprise of absolutely nobody who's interested in prosthetics, was initially inspired by the last few minutes of [this amazing TED Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsNZJTWw0w). Anyone who wants a visual for Dr. Traoré's show-legs can imagine a cross between the [Exo Prosthetic](http://3dprintingindustry.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/exo_leg_side.jpg) and something from [Viktoria Modesta's workshop](http://www.thealternativelimbproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AltLimbPro_2_011.jpg).


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You don't know what wakes you first: the awful noises you're making or Steve's voice in your ear.

You are running.

Someone is chasing you. Many are chasing you. It's so hard to lift your feet. You feel sedated. The air is thick around you, catching at your legs like seaweed, dragging you down. If you can only get to the house, you'll be safe. The house is full of people.

You try to wade through the crowd. Some kind of party is in progress. The music is loud, something old and unrelentingly upbeat, but no one is dancing. No one is talking, either. They stand in their beautiful clothes, in pairs and in groups, holding plates, holding glasses. No one eats or drinks. No one moves until you shove them out of the way. You have to get upstairs. And then: you don't have to get upstairs. There is no upstairs. You push back through the unresisting crowd. You burst out into the night. They're still chasing you.

You run.

There is a paddock full of horses. Beautiful horses, the kind rich men pay other people to ride. The one nearest you is huge and shiny-black. Darker than the night. Silhouette. Dark feathering around its hooves, steam rising from its coat in ribbons. The horse touches you with its muzzle. There is a hunting knife in your hand. You want to touch the horse but you have a knife. You could touch it with your other hand, but you don't have another hand. The other hand is a weapon too.

You hamstring its back leg. It goes down: stumbling, kicking. It shrieks. You stand over it and think: I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to. You cut its other leg. You move on to the next horse. If you do this, the people chasing you won't be able to catch you. You hamstring all of them. You are going to do this and then you are going to run.

They scream.

The air is thick around your wrists, your neck. It crawls into your mouth. It drags you to the earth. You're on the ground with the blood and the shrieks and the flailing hooves, choking. Dirt under your nails. Dirt in your throat. You're drowning. You're drowning.

You don't know what wakes you first: the awful noises you're making or Steve's voice in your ear. Soothing tones. Russian. English is your first language except when you're asleep. Your heart is pounding too loud, but you think he's probably telling you to breathe. You haul in air. It burns like fire all the way down, aching from your tongue to your belly. There might be something torn in your throat. Coughing like a smoker on the exhale. The next breath hurts too, but it's a little easier. When you open your eyes, you're on your back, Steve hovering over you, holding you down. Familiar. It isn't the first time you've struck out or clawed at yourself in your sleep.

“Чёрт побери́,” you say, and the iron goes out of him.

Steve flops down next to you. Almost before he lands, you're there. You curl into a ball and butt your head into his chest. He wraps himself around you without hesitation. He never hesitates. Steve is always very deliberate when he touches people. Times like this, you think, you love that about him more than anything else. Your anchor: your one still point. You listen to his heartbeat until the world feels less fuzzy.

“The conference?” Steve asks.

You shake your head against him. “No,” you say. Less certain: “Maybe. Yeah. It was—” You gesture in front of your eyes: something frightening in your face. You mean: intense. The word won't find its way to your mouth.

Steve rubs your shoulder. You focus on your breathing.

“You always dreamed real vivid as a kid,” he says after a while. It surprises you. You think you've heard every variation on _when we were young_ in Steve's arsenal.

“Tell me,” you say.

“That's it, really.” Steve clears his throat, settles further into the mattress. Wraps himself a little tighter around you. “Most mornings until we were, oh, in our teens, you'd always have some weird dream to tell me. They were fantastic, just crazy. Real detailed. Between that and how much you loved the pulps, I figured you might end up a writer.”

You can't help barking a laugh. It's watery, but it feels good. “Close. Managed to become a pulp instead. The both of us.”

“That's really—” Steve laughs through his nose. “Yeah.”

“Bet I would have, in another universe,” you say. “I'd have written spaceship stories and you'd have illustrated them.” You can't remember if you liked to write, but you know your grades were good. It's nice to think about, anyway. You and Steve, living together, making things, another Leyendecker and Beach. Britten and Pears.

“What, like Amazing Stories? Bug-eyed monsters and buxom dames?”

“No, like.” You bump your head against his chest, prompting. “After your—our time. Bright colours. Big open spaces. Thin lines.”

“Moebius!” Steve sounds delighted. “We'd've made a mint, Buck. That stuff went nuts after the war.”

“It'd go nuts now,” you counter. “You should sell some paintings. Steve Rogers After Moebius, or whatever people call tributes these days. Fund an art scholarship or something.”

Steve makes a thoughtful noise. You breathe in, breathe out. You still feel thin-skinned, raw, but not as bad. Talking is real. The dream isn't. It's not a memory: just a crazy-quilt, an anxious firing of neurons. Just a scary picture. It fades as the sweat dries on the back of your neck.

“What time is it?” you ask.

Steve turns half over; turns back. “5:08. Justifiably morning, if you need an excuse.”

You'd pay a thousand dollars for another few uninterrupted hours of sleep, but experience tells you that you'll dream worse if you fall back to sleep now. Getting up is a smart move. It doesn't stop you from grumbling into Steve's collarbone for ten minutes first.

Steve puts his exercise gear on and disappears into the elevator. Wasting time in the gym until he can reasonably bug Sam into jogging with him. Sam is an early riser, but not this early.

Mariam is at the kitchen table when you walk in. It doesn't look like she's moved a muscle in twelve hours.

“Did you even sleep?” you ask, incredulously.

Mariam grunts at you. It might be _yes, I am a responsible student_ as much as it might be _go fuck a cactus_.

You sigh and put more coffee on.

 

* * *

 

Out of what you grudgingly recognize as self-sabotage, you text Carl and ask to reschedule. Carl's response is firmly in the negative. You're not even a little surprised. Carl doesn't have any superpowers, but sometimes you wonder. Maybe there's a level of Zen Senior that some old people manage to ascend into. Limited telepathy. Healing factor powered by grouch. Summon tea on command. (Or maybe it's just Carl being scary.)

Your phone rings at 8:00. The volume is up higher than you remember. It makes you jump: _yeah, she's got life in her veins, she don't need no rescuing—_

“Hey,” you say.

“Hi,” says Pepper. She sounds exhausted. “No need to show up today, okay? Bruce and I just put Tony to bed with a sedative. He was up all night tinkering with the gauntlets, apparently. You know how he gets after this sort of thing.”

“Yeah,” you say, feelingly. The week of the Riots had been—bad. You purposefully mangled a few servos in your own arm to keep Tony occupied. Twice. You can't say you're not relieved, though. You're not feeling too swift yourself. “Do you want me to call Ruth and Mohan?”

“Thanks, but I already did. Honestly, I'm tempted to give them the rest of the week—they were really shaken up—but I don't want to make a bigger deal out of it than it is.”

“Keeping a regular schedule is good for recovery,” you agree, hoping you don't sound too much like one of your old workbooks.

“The lab's going to be empty, if you want to tinker,” says Pepper. “Otherwise, I hope you have a nice, quiet day.”

“You too,” you say, although hers is likely to be anything but.

Her laugh confirms it. “Thanks, James. Bye.”

You don't go down to the lab. You take the dogs up to the roof instead. Tug-of-war until they get too rowdy, and then tennis balls until they flop under a deck chair, panting. It doesn't take much. You think you need the activity more than they do.

You eat lunch, and then you go to your doom.

 

* * *

 

“You'll never believe what my granddaughter re-tweeted this morning,” Carl says, as you walk into his office. Carl is leaning heavily on his cane, hips tilted in the way that means his knee is bothering him. Seventy-eight next month. He keeps less than twenty clients these days. You're one of the lucky ones.

“Yankees struck out again?” you say, but it sounds weak even to you. Carl presents you with a tablet and a sceptical expression.

 _Stark employees assaulted @ BAM Harvey Theater!_ it says. The photograph looks like it was taken on a cell phone from fairly close range, outside the building. It's focused on Tony, and Djene's elbow is obscuring part of the shot, but there you are: half turned, blurry. Your raw cheek; one wide-open eye. The angle suggests that Tony is supporting some of your weight, even though he wasn't. It looks just like some of the photographs in your file, the very old ones, before they made you forget you were a person. Fear in your eyes. Blood around your nostrils. Shoulders up to your ears.

You feel sick.

“You can see why I was concerned when you tried to cancel your appointment,” says Carl. You swallow, numb. You give him the tablet. You sit in the chair opposite, the window at your left. Outside: taxis and trucks moving. The office is only a few floors above ground. You watch the morning traffic and take a few breaths through your nose.

Carl says, “Not wearing your arm today?”

“No.”

“James.” Carl looks over his bifocals. His blue eyes: much lighter than yours. Almost colourless. They would be uncanny if his face wasn't so kindly. “Are you victimizing yourself?”

You shake your head. “It's not about the arm,” you say. You gesture with your right hand. “I used this one.”

Carl leans back and waits, so you tell him: the dance, the panel, the man with the gun. How you crushed the man's hand. The sound he made when you hurt him. You don't tell Carl how that made you feel. You know he can see it.

“Okay,” says Carl. “Let's pick this apart. Are you concerned that you've lost control? That you'll hurt someone else? Someone innocent?”

“No.”

“Do you believe you were acting out of good intentions, not sadistic ones?”

“Yes, but—”

Carl holds up a hand. “No qualifiers yet. Did you stop once the gunman was subdued, without using additional force?”

“I—think so. Yeah.”

“Are you worried about being put in another situation where you might have to hurt someone for perfectly good reasons?”

Adrenaline, shocky-cold, crawls out from your chest. You lick your teeth. You look at your hand on the chair-rest and nod.

Carl taps something out on his tablet. “We both know very well that situations like that are rarer than hen's teeth, even in a city like New York, but that doesn't help the anxiety gremlins, does it?”

You manage a laugh. “No.” You add, hesitant, trying not to sound defensive: “Maybe a little less rare, for us? Because we work around Avengers?”

“Perhaps,” Carl allows. “But still, almost vanishingly unlikely. I'd lay much better odds on you getting run over by a taxi than another face-to-face encounter with a violent offender.”

“I know,” you say.

“But...”

All in a rush: “I didn't want to hurt anyone. I spent—” You swallow the years. Natalia always tells you not to focus on them. “They used me to hurt people, and I can't do a damn thing to fix any of it, and I've had to make my peace with that, but I don't want it to be a—a _part_ of me anymore. The hurting. I don't want it to be there. Ever.”

Your hand shakes. You make a fist on your leg.

“Even when you need it?” Carl asks. “If you'd been the only thing standing between that man and innocent lives, yesterday—would you rather have been incapable of doing anything to stop him?”

You say nothing.

“It's a terrible responsibility,” says Carl. Gentle: so gentle. His deep, creaky voice. “A terrible responsibility. I've worked with enhanced persons for thirty, nearly forty years. The dangerous among them wonder if they have they have a right to life if their existence can be harmful to others. The righteous wonder if they should be allowed to choose retirement over death. Artists often struggle with similar doubts—if they have a skill but refuse to use it to beautify the world, is that a crime of omission? It's even harder when the individuals involved—and there's so many of them, James, just like you, and it breaks my heart—have been given powers they never asked for, strengthened against their wills by people who want the streets to run with blood. And after all, it's so much easier to be a tool than a person, isn't it? Tools never need to make moral judgements.”

Carl once told you what he saw in 1965. What he did in 1966. Things worse than My Lai, things that happened deep in the jungle, things that never made the papers. Children torn to pieces in the tall grass. Boys made bloodthirsty by the propaganda machine. In a way, what Carl did was worse than what you did: he was a person, then. He thought he was doing the right thing, even when it was awful. He made choices based on lies, but. He was able to make choices. The weapon was in his hand. He wasn't the weapon, except for the ways he was.

You think: you would never accept this from someone who wasn't Carl. Someone who didn't know what it was like. Carl has never stood on a smoking bridge, on a shore, in a museum, has never remembered being a person in pieces, but—he's like you. A weapon, except for the ways he wasn't.

“We have to be bigger than what we did,” Carl is saying. “And usually, that means being smaller. Honest citizens, quiet neighbours, good friends. We whittle ourselves down to mundanity, shut the lid on our history. But it's my belief that sometimes, when the occasion calls for it, using our dreadful parts for good is a more virtuous act than stepping aside. It's a slap in the face to anyone who saw you as nothing more than a gun. Locking the monster in a cage is sufficient, but if you can bridle it—if you can _use_ it to save lives—it's my feeling that you should. That you have a moral imperative to do so, if I may go that far.”

“But where's the line?” you ask. You realize you're leaning forward in your chair. “How do you separate things like that from—from vigilantism?”

“I'm not suggesting you should roam the streets at night in a cape,” says Carl. “But—have you heard of Kitty Genovese? No? She was a young woman who was stabbed to death here, in New York, just over in Queens. At least a dozen people heard or saw her being attacked over the course of half an hour, but none of them did a thing to help. Now, you could argue that they were frightened, that they were scared the man would turn on them if they intervened, that they assumed someone else was calling the police, but in the final analysis, they all bear some small responsibility in her eventual death. If _you_ had been there, however—”

“I would've helped her,” you say. You understand: you might have been the only one who could have done something. You wouldn't have been scared the man would hurt you. You would have been scared to hurt the man, but. You would have been more scared that the man would kill the woman. Like yesterday. Like the man with the gun. You understand: a moral imperative. You understand.

Carl sees the light come on. He smiles.

“I still wish I hadn't had to,” you say.

Carl makes an expansive gesture: of course. “It doesn't belittle your actions to wish it hadn't happened. That being said,” he adds, “I think part of your problem is that the only way you know how to deal with a threat is with extreme prejudice. Which is fine, if you're working for SWAT, but you aren't, and it's triggering for you besides. So I'd like you to replace at least one of your weekly gym days with aikido—it's much more defensive than combative. There's a lady in the building I recommend, I'll give you her card. She teaches non-violent self defence for psychiatric nurses, trauma survivors, and so forth, in addition to martial arts. Acceptable homework?”

“Very,” you say.

“Excellent.” Carl claps his hands gently together. “Let's mark it down as a horizon issue we'll need to address as feelings come up, and move onto the real reason you wanted to see me today.”

You wince. You were hoping, a little, that yesterday's events would take up the whole session.

“You booked this appointment four days ago,” says Carl. “What did you want to talk about?”

Out the window: a line of taxis moving together, in a chevron, like a wave. You sit still for so long that Carl gets up to make tea. His quick, unbalanced bustle. The dull thump of his cane. A bass rumble from the kettle. You don't move until Carl sets a squashed clay mug on the windowsill beside you. On your left side: you'll have to reach across your body to pick it up. But you won't, not now. It'll be too hot for minutes yet.

“I'm,” you say. You fidget; make yourself stop. Carl waits. His saint-like patience. The patience of a sniper.

You say: “I've been thinking of asking Steve to marry me.”

Carl's eyebrows slowly rise. “Would you like to try that again, with a little _less_ enthusiasm this time?”

“I just think it's a—” You stop yourself. You aren't allowed to say _a dumb idea_ in Carl's presence. Or any other put-down, for that matter. Lamely: “I want to, but I don't see the point. We've been together almost, Christ, seven years? And I guess you could say we've been together since the twenties, except for how we weren't on kissing terms then—” You ignore Carl's restrained snort. “—and it's not like we need to prove anything, so—”

“All right, all right, hold your horses,” says Carl. “As much as I'm enjoying the beautiful verbal pratfalls occurring in front of me—no, don't you contradict me, you're trying to talk yourself out of something before you've even done it, James, let me help you untangle this. Why do people get married?”

“Love,” you say promptly. Carl waits. “To have kids. Um, visitation.” Carl makes a _go on_ gesture. You try: “Tax breaks?”

“In a very legalistic sense, yes. Under the modern Western definition, marriage provides rights and security for two people in love.”

You blink. “There's another way to define it?”

“In other cultures, and in other times, marriage wasn't about love,” says Carl. “It was a pact between two families that brought benefits to both parties—politically, financially, and so on. Your spouse was your administrative ally, not your romantic partner. Emotional compatibility was more of a happy coincidence than a motivating factor. Marriage was, at the end of the day, a contract for stabilising kinship networks.”

“I...don't see how that's relevant to my situation,” you say.

“Just putting it into perspective.” Carl takes off his glasses and polishes them on his sweater. You wonder if he's making a visual pun. “You feel like offering marriage after years of loving partnership is redundant, perhaps even trite, but maybe you need to re-frame it. Think of it as joining two families which were previously separate.”

“Steve and me, we don't have any family,” you say.

Carl turns the full force of his Fond Grandpa expression on you. “Don't you?”

“No,” you say. “They're all dead. Or, well, his extended family's dead, and my extended family thinks I'm dead, so.”

“Well, then,” says Carl, “I suggest, like your definition of marriage, you may want to update your definition of _family_.” Before you can ask what that means, Carl barrels ahead: “So, what brought this on?”

“It's just been on my mind,” you lie. You don't want to tell him you've been daydreaming about it for months. You don't want to tell him you couldn't stop thinking about it at Carter's funeral. Death making you obsess about life. It's not that you're ashamed; it's just that it feels so trivial, in those words. Typical. But: it didn't start there. It couldn't have.

When did it start? you wonder. When did you first look at Steve and think: I want to see a ring on his finger, I want to hear it click when he switches a paintbrush from hand to hand, I want it like I want to breathe. You can't remember wanting it before, not with anyone. You can't remember wanting Steve with you before. Not like that. During the war you wanted him close, wanted him to never be more than ten paces away unless you could see him through rifle sights—wanted to hear his voice. Not the way he spoke with the other men, but with you, in private. Low tones. Low and easy.

You pause. 

You think: well, I suppose that's love, after all.

“You have been exposed to the topic frequently, of late,” says Carl thoughtfully. “Dr. Traoré and her husband separated in the spring, and her daughter is going to be a single mother voluntarily—didn't Anthony and Pepper celebrate their anniversary last month?”

“Yeah.” Thor and Dr. Foster the month before. An infestation of anniversaries. You say, “I don't feel like I'm missing something. It's—” Rebelliously: “—stupid. It's only a piece of paper. I don't know why I can't get it out of my head.”

“When you finished your bachelor's degree last year, did you feel like your diploma was just a piece of paper? Something stupid?”

“No,” you say, thinking: that sounded belligerent. You try again. “No, but I put a lot of work into it. It was like, I dunno, an acknowledgement—” You stop.

“An acknowledgement of achievement,” Carl finishes, in a way you couldn't. “Or perhaps a statement of commitment—a lifelong and passionate effort towards the betterment of other people's lives.”

You pick up your tea. Sloppy: a rivulet over your thumb. You lick it off and take a too-hot gulp of peppermint.

When you're certain it won't come out rusty, you say, “For a guy who never settled down, you sure have a lot of nice things to say about the institution of marriage.”

Carl snorts. He knows you mean: thank you.

After a moment, Carl says, “You've come an awfully long way. A long way from the man who walked into my office for the first time. You were holding yourself together with spit and baling wire, you know, it was very obvious. It was such a supreme effort—I was impressed. You'd already accomplished miracles on your own, just to get to that doorway, and you were so absolutely determined to _become_. You never once took the easy way out. You never once decided it was too hard. And you came to me today deeply concerned about your strength and about the suitability of a union, but all I see is how much _that man_ , the one in the doorway, could not have talked about those things out loud.” Carl thumps his cane on the floor twice, decisively. “You've come such a long way, James. I'm very proud of you. You should be, too.”

You duck your head and hide a smile in your tea.

You know.

You are.

“I have something for you,” says Carl. You look up, startled. He stumps his way over to the bookshelf and back, and puts an object wrapped in brown paper on your palm. “I've had it a good while, but I was waiting for the right moment to give it to you.” He flaps his hand. “Go ahead, then.”

You stop staring at the parcel like it's going to bite you. You hold it between your knees so you can rip off the outer layer of paper with your hand. Unfold the rest of it in your lap, carefully. What comes out is a beautiful little glazed bowl. Or maybe, you think, one of those teacups without handles. Soft lavender smudged with brown. And: a series of long spidery cracks filled with gold.

You know this, so you say so. You don't remember the name, but you've seen it on the internet. The art of repairing pottery with gold lacquer. You think it's something to do with embracing flaws. Acknowledging history. The importance of using an object even after it's broken.

Carl leans forward in his chair. He whispers, gleeful: “ _It's a metaphor._ ”

You laugh until you choke.

 

* * *

 

You take a long walk to clear your head. You almost turn back before the doors, too conscious of your face. The lobby bathroom shows you it isn't as bad as you think. A crescent-shaped bruise pooling under your eye socket. A redder tint to your cheekbone, smudged around the butterfly bandages like a lady's powder. You peel them off. The long split is sealed, shiny-pink. It looks a week old. You tug up your hood before you step outside.

When you come back, you shut the door of the suite behind yourself and toe off your shoes. You hear people. Thumps. Laughter. Beef cooking—no, lamb—and something else. You stand in the hall with your eyes closed until it comes to you: green peppers, maybe, and mushrooms. A sweet sauce. Hoisin. Josie pokes her head into the hall and whines.

“Where's your girlfriend?” you ask. She scrambles off. You follow her to the kitchen.

Aimee is standing next to Steve at the stove, wearing an apron patterned with happy skulls. She's stirring the contents of a pot while Steve flips meat in the much-abused household wok. Bright sizzles. At the table, Mariam and Bruce lean over a pile of notes and flashcards. Bruce talking: quiet voice, loud hands. Natalia is sitting on the counter, one knee up, two fingers hooked between her toes. Leggings and a too-big blouse, flicking red curls out of her eyes. Reading aloud from her tablet in French, in starts and stops. Aimee is interrupting: laughing, and laughing again.

You stop in the doorway.

You think: update your definition of family.

You think: I am very, very stupid.

Steve doesn't startle when you wrap your arm around his waist. You press your forehead to the back of his skull. He keeps moving the wok. You can feel it through the muscles of his shoulders. A dial clicks, and then he turns around. You let go of him just long enough for him to turn, and then you cling.

“Tough session?”

You nod against him. The motion moving his tee-shirt.

“You want some privacy?” Steve asks, quieter. You shake your head. You want them to stay. Steve makes an affirmative noise and just holds you, leaning against the oven door.

“Carl's a bastard,” Natalia says. She doesn't mean anything by it. Carl was her therapist too, when she came in from the cold. She goes to someone different now, a woman out in Soho with stretched earlobes and eight cats, who you'd never know used to be an army drill sergeant if Natalia hadn't told you.

“No, I'm just an idiot,” you say. Muffled by Steve's everything.

“Dollar in the negativity jar,” Mariam says distractedly.

Steve digs around in your pocket until he finds a bill. From the motion, you think he flips it in Mariam's general direction. Her snort says: probably yes.

“I think that's a good cue for a break,” says Bruce. You hear a textbook shut with a snap. Mariam makes an unhappy noise. “You know, in the 1500's, a very wise man named Giovanni Porta wrote that frequent breaks are essential to retaining learning, especially if it's mentally taxing.”

“In the 1500's they believed that witches float,” says Mariam. Scuffling, like she's trying to reach around him for her textbook.

“Science has since confirmed his theory,” says Bruce. Laughter around the edges of his words.

“I saved a zucchini for you to grate,” says Aimee, bright.

Mariam sighs “ _fiiiine_ ” like a grumpy teenager. You smile against Steve's shirt. You listen to Bruce moving papers. The hollow scrape of a vegetable being mangled. A spoon against the side of a pot.

Steve eventually has to tend the food. You feel awkward with nobody to touch. You step away from the stove, a calculated retreat, but Natalia clears her throat pointedly.

When she first came to visit you here, you were scared for her, scared of yourself, of hurting her, even though you knew she could take you out at the knees. And then you found out that she kissed Steve, and you were scared of her. All the women who kissed Steve were terrifying. Towering, in your patchwork memories. Lorna MacIntyre, who rigged your doorbell to shock you after you walked in on her and Steve making time. Private Lorraine, who danced you near to death between missions, and drank you into a coma afterwards. Carter, who—well. She was Peggy Carter.

And Natalia.

You felt so awkward around her. You didn't know where the line was. You maybe raised her, a little. You taught her how to kill. You tried to kill her twice. Now: it's easy to step between her knees and let her sharp chin dig into the top of your head. Her wrists cross on the back of your neck. She scratches your scalp with uncharacteristically long nails. A dry spell on combat missions. Or, she's growing them out for undercover work.

“What's in your pocket?” she asks. 

You pull out the little bowl in its brown paper swaddle. Natalia's eyes go soft. She takes it from you with her fingertips. Examines it on all sides like a jeweller. You like that about Natalia: her love of details. You went with her once to a tiny fair trade shop in Brooklyn. Soapstone and carved wood and resiny smells. Rainsticks and thumb pianos. Whenever she found something with a new texture, she would turn it over and over in her hands. Learning the edges of everything.

You glance around, but no one is looking in your direction. You tap Natalia's knee. When she looks, you sign: _I need your help with something_. Your hands quick and low. One side of her mouth, twitching up. Your secret like a fish-hook.

Natalia hops off the counter and grabs your hand. “Back in a minute!” she says, and pulls you out of the kitchen. You hear Steve: “Just be back by six!” and Bruce laughing.

Natalia's suite is your favourite besides your own. It's close like a cave, draped fabrics and squashy furniture and paintings in dark jewel tones. A sideboard and dining table from the turn of the century. A console radio. Natalia likes old things. Not the way Steve likes old things; he likes antiques because they're not, not to him. Natalia told you that she likes the history. You think: details. The messy edges of things.

You thought, before you knew her better, that she would like old books too. The smell, the worn covers. Refined and mannered stories. Prose that's almost poetry. Or maybe history; things in order, things that can be touched. But: she reads cheap fantasy novels by the dozens. Her shelves are double-racked with bright paperbacks from boot sales and charity shops. Stickers and stains. Half of them aren't in English. Most of them have ended up in your suite at one time or another. She steals your sci-fi novels in return.

You only notice that she still has the bowl when she tugs you over to the windows. A place to watch New York. Beanbag chairs and pillows. Fuzzy blankets. You know she sleeps out here when her bedroom feels too much like a cage. She arranges you so you're sitting kneecap-to-kneecap, the bowl in the space between her crossed ankles and yours. You think: Steve would love to paint this. You and Natalia and the East River beyond.

She leans forward and says, delighted, impatient: “Okay. Out with it.”

“I want your help,” you say, before you can change your mind. “Picking out a ring.” You let out a breath. “For Steve.”

She goes still everywhere but her eyes. Blinks. Blinks again.

Then:

“ _Ha!_ ” she says, like an explosion. You jump. “Barton owes me $50! He bet you wouldn't until after Christmas.”

“I ain't asking _tonight_ ,” you protest. “But I want do it right when I do, so I need a ring—”

“You're adorable,” she says, patronizing. She pats you on the head. You squint. “It's like you think I don't already have a locked Pinterest page set up.”

“You—”

“Knew you were going to ask _me_ for advice and estimated when you might cave? Yes.”

You glare at her, but it's half-hearted.

She grins. “I'll fetch my laptop, shall I?”

“Go, git.”

Natalia scrambles up. Deftly does not step on the bowl, her toes on either side of it, dancing.

She comes back with her laptop, but also:

Another little bowl. Gunmetal glaze with streaks like old copper. Lightning-fork cracks. Buttery gold. You suck in a breath; let it out. She sets it next to yours, the rims almost touching. Hers is a little rounder, a little larger.

“Welcome to the Recovering Brainwashed Assassins Club,” Natalia says. “Give Barton notice, he'll bring his. We'll have a playdate.”

Before you can get wobbly about that, she smacks her laptop down on a pillow and gets in your face: “What—” like you've stabbed her in the back, “— _took_ you so long, Barnes?”

You wince.

“Already told you,” you say. “I'm an idiot.”

“Clearly.” Softer. She wakes up her laptop. “You glow, you know. When you look at him. I used to think that was a painfully stupid romantic cliché, but you honestly do. You light right up.” Her hand on your knee like she's gentling a horse. “I can't think of two people better suited for _till death do us part_. Really.”

“He's,” you say, and then you stop. It isn't in Steve, the thing that happens. It's about him, but it's in you. You felt it on the helicarrier: up through your spine like a fuse. You shot him hoping it would stop. It didn't. It took you by the scruff of the neck and threw you into the water after him.

The feeling is like this:

You don't know where it was, because it could have been anywhere. Any foreign field. It was early spring, you think. 1944. The nights were dagger-cold. There had been a windstorm, but no rain, just clouds boiling up high, over and past. Flapping like curtains between you and the stars. You and all the rest of them down in a valley—a ditch, really—and the wind blowing over. You were on watch. The only one awake. It's why you don't ask; you're the only person alive who remembers. Wrapped up in blankets and your coat and Steve's, because he ran halfway to fever when he wasn't moving, and you: still sharp-ribbed from the table. Watching.

Down in the valley with the wind blowing over, moaning in the boughs, a far-off creaking. The stars, peek-a-boo. You remember the strangest feeling coming up in you. The wind went over without curling into the ditch, drawing one cold line across the fields. Howling plumb-level through the trees and away. You, down under it, in an alcove off the side of the world. An isolation chamber. Something like adrenaline in your chest: like invincibility. Like a whole army could come marching past and never see you. A feeling of safety like you'd never known. A rightness. You were lofty there, with all the men sleeping around your feet. The rifle in your lap like an afterthought. It wasn't your bullets protecting them. It was the wind.

You try to tell Natalia, haltingly. You try to tell her about the valley and the wind, and the feeling in you like clouds moving, weightless. You try, and you probably fail. But: she nods. You think if anyone can understand even a little, it's her. She nods, and she touches your hand.

“That's what it feels like,” you say, “When I look at Steve.”

She nods again, serious, and then she smirks. “You're a poet and you didn't know it, and your feet show it—”

You swat at her: “Don't!” But you're laughing.

“No, really, I like it,” she says.

“Carl says it's on account of how I associate Steve with being saved,” you say. Your milestone memories: the table, the shore. Steve leaning over you in Clint's apartment. Safety.

Natalia makes a face. “That's not as good a story. Don't tell that one at the wedding.”

“Will I have to tell stories at the wedding?” you ask, alarmed.

Natalia snuggles up to your side with an evil expression. “Oh, sweet summer child. This is going to be so much fun.”

“Shut up,” you say, and steal the laptop.

 

* * *

 

Natalia's fingers on your cheek. Her nails on the edge of the bruise. When she says: “Are you okay?” she isn't talking about your face.

“I will be,” you say.

 

* * *

 

You sweat when you're anxious: behind your knees, in the small of your back. It shouldn't make you nervous, just picking out a ring. It isn't a big deal. But: your body doesn't listen. You take a shower and put your arm on before you go to the media room.

Everyone is there. Steve, Sam, and Clint are on the sofa, with room for you. Tony and Pepper are curled up in a recliner like teenagers. Thor and Jane are on the loveseat. Darcy sprawls on the floor next to them. Bruce, immune to colds, shares the other sofa with Maria and Rhodey and their pile of tissues. Djene has a recliner to herself; her daughters like attendants on their beanbag chairs. Mariam is removing her mother's blades and massaging her stumps.

Natalia's ear is pressed against Aimee's belly. When you come into the room, Natalia flinches away. She touches her fingertips to her cheek. Laughing: “She kicked me!”

“She does that,” says Aimee. She aims a mock punch at her stomach. “Kicky McGee here is lining herself up for a soccer scholarship, I tell you what.”

“Martial arts,” you say. It's only logical: a tower full of superheroes, and Aimee will need babysitters. You can imagine a little girl stumbling around with Natalia, running after Steve, pretending to apprehend bad guys in the gym. Aimee's cheekbones, someone else's nose; Djene's chin, maybe, skipping a generation.

Aimee points at you. A murderous expression. “Just for that, you get diaper duty.”

You shrug. “I like babies.”

At least, you think you do. You remember your sisters. Sometimes you wish you had more, but what you have is good. Happy. Most of them go like this: you're on a bare wooden floor with Becca and Dot, keeping their tower of blocks steady, Irene cooing in the bassinet. Or: you're running alongside (Dot? Irene?) with your arms out ready, her high-stepping baby waddle, tiny leather shoes in a dusty alley, making a beeline for—someone. Cut-up reels, no context. Your life as filmed by the world's most incompetent cameraman.

“Well, that makes one of us,” says Natalia. “I wouldn't know how to deal with a baby if it came gift-wrapped with instructions.”

“You'll learn,” Aimee says.

Natalia goes a little pale.

“Oh, sweet summer child,” you say. She throws a balled-up napkin at your head. Steve reaches out and bats it away. Darcy catches it and tosses it up, playing keep-away with Jane, who flops over the arm of the loveseat, swatting like a cat. Thor's laughter rumbles the floor.

“Let's be real, I don't think anybody with an Avengers ID is qualified to handle small humans,” says Tony.

“Excuse you,” says Sam. “My eleventy-hundred nieces say you're wrong.”

“Yeah, hey,” says Darcy. “Babies are great.”

“Informal experiment,” says Bruce. “Raise your right hand if you were a terrible baby, your left if you like babies.”

There's a wild show of hands around the room. You don't get a chance to interpret the results, because Tony makes an offended noise and points. You look at Steve: both his hands are in his lap.

“No,” says Tony. “I categorically refuse to believe you were a good baby.”

“Ma always said I was a dream,” says Steve. Laughter and catcalls. “Really! I made up for it by being terrible later.”

Sam groans. “Please tell me you were a really gross twelve-year-old. It'd make up for your current everything.”

“Oh, yeah. Awful. I grew four inches, but it was mostly arm. Really spotty. Never grew facial hair, but my voice dropped into the Black Lagoon. _Bucky_ , on the other hand...” Steve looks at you.

“Yeah?” you say. “What about me?”

“Bucky,” says Steve to the room, sounding mortally offended, “Looked like Cary Grant by the time he was fourteen.”

“ _No way_ ,” says Darcy.

“Hand to god,” says Steve. He grins at you. “You shot up like a weed, and you had all those muscles from helping Mr. Lebovitz repair the roof through the summer, and your stupid cowlick disappeared overnight—girls three grades above us used to flirt with you on the way home. I'm pretty sure your ma thought I was going to strangle you.”

“Some things never change,” says Clint. “A hundred years later, you're still failing at murdering each other.”

You keep a straight face until Steve raises an invisible toast and cries: “Cent' anni!” and then nobody is okay.

 

* * *

 

Getting a roomful of superheroes to sit down and shut up is a task. Darcy gives up and sits on both Sam and Clint, smacking her hand over their mouths. Bruce tosses a blanket over Maria and Rhodey. Thor steals Jane's work tablet and gently puts Mjolnir on top of it. Djene throws a prosthetic at Tony.

When the movie finally happens, Steve spends most of it tense against your side.

You almost bring it up, after a particularly violent interrogation scene. You're not sure if he realizes he's doing it. You'd tell him, if you didn't think it would be embarrassing to be so transparent. You want to say: Stevie, it doesn't bother me. There's something about the wall of fog between you and your memories, the distance of the screen. Things like this don't upset you. It's never the obvious. It's the little things—things you'd never think of. Tony in the lab saying, mock-stern, _don't move, Sarge_ ; you went still and empty and far away. Women speaking Cajun. The smell of cloves, once, but only because it was raining. Fireworks are fine; the toaster makes you jump a mile.

Then again, it isn't necessarily about you. Not like that.

Steve often puts his fingertips on your collarbone. Your scapula. On the little white dimples where the arm was screwed into your bones. He's always noticing the differences between your serums. You don't heal as fast as Steve, but you have more endurance. He's faster than you. You're more flexible. But this: you know this hurts him. That you scar. That they gave you scars. That you gave yourself scars, fixing what they did. You don't think he'll ever stop being angry about that. He'd sooner stop breathing. Sometimes, you think, if Steve ever stopped eating, the serum might sustain him on anger alone.

You'd do anything, if it would wipe the anger out of him. You'd say anything to convince him. You want to say: it's over. You want to say: it's okay. Instead, you grab his hand and squeeze. Not like you need comfort. For him: reassurance. Your bones and his bones, being here now. _I'm here_ , you say with your fingers curled between his. _I'm here_ in your dry knuckles. _I'm here_ in your unbitten nails. Everything else is window dressing. Nothing in your past can take you away. Cent' anni. Cent' anni.

 _I'm here_ , you say, and Steve squeezes back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding the pulps: [what Steve's thinking](http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/11/151104_FUT_pulp-sci-fi-super-science.jpg.CROP.promovar-medium2.jpg) versus [what Bucky's thinking](http://i843.photobucket.com/albums/zz352/loaloauk/Disney%20Planets/voyagedhermes_moebius_02.png). Moebius did more comics than covers -- including one of Stan Lee's, _Silver Surfer: Parable_ , and a [wonderfully unsettling illustration of Iron Man](http://i42.photobucket.com/albums/e342/Alamaris/ac7857beb61ff4e138338890c16cf84b_zpsj5f2rmc0.jpg).
> 
> The pottery repaired with gold is [kintsugi](http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/kintsugi-kintsukuroi).
> 
> Чёрт побери́: dammit.
> 
> Cent' anni: literally, a century. It's a toast: may you live a hundred years! Or, in their case, a hundred more.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You feel something that's almost too bright to be happiness. Too sharp. It cuts your heart to ribbons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ob. Disclaimer: There's some discussion of the Superhero Registration Act in this chapter, and I feel I should state up front that I have exactly zero knowledge of how Civil War played out in the comics, or how it'll play out in the upcoming film. (This is not so much an excuse as an admittance of total disinterest. *g*) As a result, the SHRA in this universe ended up being... probably a lot more fascist and scary than either of the canon Acts? Before we accept it as a minor deviation and move along: none of the opinions expressed by the characters are meant to represent a dig at anyone on either side of the Civil War firing line. I'm team _Why Can't We All Just Get Along_ , but you do you! Cool? Cool.

The universe is conspiring to make sure you don't sleep in.

Some rough hour before dawn, an alarm. Steve's Avengers ID blaring: _assemble! assemble!_ He tries to turn it off. He only succeeds in batting it to the floor. You groan into your pillow.

“JARVIS?” Steve asks. Half asleep, you put your hand over his mouth. “What's the—mmph.”

“I am afraid the call is a Code Black, Captain,” says JARVIS apologetically. “The Quinjet will be ready to depart in nine minutes.”

Steve flings himself out of bed.

You watch him pull on his tactical uniform in the dark. Half muscle-memory, half habit. His pant legs around his boots, like Dernier showed you all in the field: so you can put your feet in your boots and pull your trousers up in one motion. He taught everyone after a lakeside ambush resulted in Dugan shooting nude. You remember Morita arguing against it. Fuck efficiency, he said: there's nothing scarier than a six-foot naked Mick with a shotgun. Psychological warfare! Everybody wins.

You don't remember who said: _No, pal, we definitely lose._ Maybe it was you.

Your feet hit the floor as Steve fastens his collar. You steal the helmet before he can put it on. Haul him into a hug: your arm around his neck, helmet dangling against his spine. Steve goes limp against you. There's seven minutes before he needs to be on the roof. You're justified in taking sixty seconds of that for yourself. He might be back by lunchtime; he might be gone for weeks. You've learned to scrounge for moments.

The roof is a no-go zone while the Quinjet is taking off. You always see Steve to the elevator and go out to the balcony to watch it leave. Clint's designated flight path out of Manhattan gives you a good long view. The dogs follow you out, Josie pacing, Clara whining. You put your hand on her soft skull and wait. Sometimes, when the rear doors of the Quinjet are still open, you can see Steve salute.

The doors aren't open tonight.

You wonder, as you usually do, what it's like on the jet right now. Are they nervous? Are they joking around, or are they all business? Who's eating, who's reading, who's catching a little more sleep? You think: Natalia is probably trimming her long nails.

Mariam materializes beside you. Leans her arms on the railing. In the ambient light, you can just make out her shaved head, her strong profile. Uncannily like her mother, but only from the side. Straight-on, you'd be hard-pressed to tell they were related.

“I'll never get used to this,” she says.

You think: you and me both, sister.

“Wouldn't have to if you invested in a good pair of earplugs,” you say instead.

“But then I'd miss Steve singing Vera Lynn in the shower at the crack of dawn.”

“He's awful, isn't he?”

“It's like some kind of gift,” Mariam agrees.

She goes quiet. Eyes on the sky, searching for stars through the light pollution. You lean over the railing to look at the river. Two boats with strands of lights on their masts. Cars on the far side, firefly pinpricks. You try to decide whether it's worth going back to bed, or whether you should pull a Tony and go down to the lab. You have a lot of work waiting for you.

“Do you ever feel like a war bride?” Mariam asks.

You laugh; you can't help it. “Hell no. If anybody's the war bride, it's Steve.”

He watched you, and came after you, and stood on the cliff after you died, looking out to sea. He told you how empty he was after they woke him up. Just living. Not— _living_. In your darker moments, you wonder if Pierce was counting on that. If he knew Steve would tear down the sky trying to bring you home. A few variables here or there, and it would have been both of you drowning in the Potomac while the world burned. All those loose ends wrapped up. Neat and tidy.

“Steve was always—” You shrug. “He waited for me.”

Is still waiting, if you're honest. Waiting for you to remember. He'll deny it, but you know. His face when a new memory comes to you. You used to save them, space them out if too many came to you at once. But it felt greedy. Steve needs them more than you do. Gifts from a far country. You and Steve have both had your pasts stolen, but sometimes, you think, his situation is worse: you can't remember what you're missing. You can't mourn as deep.

“You really believe that,” says Mariam. Out of nowhere, a fierceness: “You're telling me you didn't wait for him to come find you, that you weren't—” and you stare at her, startled. She moves her jaw around nothing.

“If I did,” you say, “I don't remember.” Something of the fire goes out of her. “Jesus, kid, what brought this on? You...”

You trail off. You don't know what to say; you don't know what words to put to it. What Mariam isn't, normally.

“I'm worried,” Mariam blurts out. She sounds about twelve years old. She smacks her wrists on the balcony. Drops her forehead onto them. “Like, stupid-worried. About the baby. And everything.”

You want to touch her spine. Reassure her. You're not sure you should.

“It's gonna be fine,” you say. Mariam turns her head on her wrists and gives you a withering look. Like: thanks, Barnes, nobody's ever said _that_ before. You try a different tack. “Hey, Steve had a single ma and she raised him with practically nobody. Aimee's got,” you gesture behind you, “All of this. Your ma's people. She can have somebody different on baby patrol every day of the week if she wants.”

“Yeah, and it's not going to be weird, having a dozen babysitters with superpowers?”

You shrug with one shoulder. “You two turned out okay.”

“It's—not really the same thing.”

“Well, we're meeting Kiddo a little earlier, but...”

“That's not it,” says Mariam.

You huff and lean your hip into the balcony. Your knee brushes Josie's shoulder, which startles her, which makes Clara skitter around your ankles like a crazed thing until you grab her scruff. When you get them under control and straighten up, Mariam is chewing her lip. Thunderous brows.

“I know about you and Steve, okay?” she says at last. You're about to say: _well, yeah, where have you been?_ when she says: “Bruce told me. Well, not told me so much as—anyway. A long time ago.”

Oh.

“Oh,” you say. You grimace. “You're angry.”

“I'm not—” Mariam makes a frustrated noise: more like a growl than a grumble. “Okay, maybe. But not—I know you can't help it. It's not fair to you either, right?”

No, it's not.

The issue is telomeres.

Abnormal DNA. Yours and Steve's. Bruce's, too, but he has a whole other list of things to be more concerned about. Things you need a lot more biochem classes to understand. But you and Steve and your telomeres—you understand those, and why they're problematic.

Bruce explained it to you like this: shoelaces have plastic caps to stop them from fraying. Telomeres are like caps for chromosomes. Every time the chromosome replicates, the telomeres wear down—get shorter. They work like a clock. Once they wear down all the way, programmed cell death begins. Lifespan limiters. Your threescore years and ten, coded into your genes.

Or would be, if it wasn't for the serum.

Steve's telomeres are almost four times longer than they should be. Yours, still more than three times. Bruce—you don't like to think about how long Bruce is going to live. You don't think Bruce likes to think about it either. You and Steve don't bring it up with anyone who isn't Bruce. You could talk to Thor, arguably, but you know him less well than you'd like, and “how do you live with _living_?” isn't the way you want to re-introduce yourself.

“He gave me the hard line,” says Mariam. She twists the hem of her tank top between her fingers. “You know, Bruce. When he found out I wanted to go into medicine. He said everybody was going to be very proud of me—pre-med at sixteen! third generation doctor! hurray!—but nobody was going to talk about the dark side. So he showed me three DNA samples and said, okay, here's how science can go bad. Here's what well-meaning people can do. Do you still want to do this?” She shakes her head. “I don't know whether he didn't think I'd put it together or whether he _expected_ me to, but it was pretty obvious whose genetic material I was looking at. So. I didn't think about it for a long time? And then Aimee, and how much time she spends here, and the baby—”

You don't say anything. You don't know what to say.

“I just—I'm not looking forward to my baby niece asking why half the adults in her life don't age, you know?” Mariam says. Thin, a little desperate. “It's, it's going to be rough. Is that—” She turns, suddenly, and presses her knuckles to her mouth. “Is that why you and Steve haven't—you don't talk about kids.”

“We ain't exactly living kid-friendly lives,” you say, grateful for an easy answer. The truth catches in your throat and you look away. “But—yeah. It wouldn't be fair.”

You're thinking of the children, but: for anyone, really. You think of Carter. You think of Steve, after. You and Steve would have to watch them grow old. Steve, watching his babies die. You're not sure he would survive that. You're not sure you would, either. You say, without thinking, “It's going to be hard enough—” You let it dangle, embarrassed. It seems cruel to say: _when all of you die_. Selfish. Of course it's going to be hard; it's going to be harder for them, they'll be the ones doing it. It sounds so petty to talk about missing them. What you mean is: you love them.

“Sorry,” says Mariam. She frowns and pats your elbow, confusingly. You blink at her. “I'm being all Tiger Auntie about this and not even thinking about how you guys are feeling. Mom says all the protective father hormones got handed out to the wrong person.”

“Don't share with Nat,” you say. “She talks big, but Kiddo's gonna know how to rip a guy's balls off before she can ride a bike.”

Mariam barks laughter. It echoes off the building like bells, and takes the tension with it.

“To be honest,” you say, when she's done, “I don't pretend like I remember a damn thing about kids, but I know hiding things from them never really ends well. They've gotta face the hard questions eventually. Exposing them to all the ways life ain't fair, early on? I figure that's better, in the long run, than pretending the world's all cupcakes and rainbows.”

Mariam nods. Scrubs at her face. “Yeah. Yeah—that's a fair point, actually. God, why can't small monkeys come with a user manual?”

“You got one. It's called _your ma_.”

“Touché.” In a high pitched voice you didn't think she was capable of: “How'd you get so smart, Uncle Bucky?”

“Cleaning up Steve's messes for twenty-some-odd years,” you joke. Honesty compels you to add, “Or maybe the serum, I dunno. It's not like anybody tested my brain before Zola got ahold of me.”

“Neural functioning aside,” says Mariam, “Here's what I don't get. Telomeres weren't even discovered until, what, 1971? And telomerase in the mid eighties, I think, so how did a process from the forties manage to effect your genetic code the way it did? How did two _different_ serums—”

“I think,” you say, “It was an accident.”

“Jesus,” Mariam whispers. Face in her hands. “ _Je-sus_.”

You have to ask: “ _Did_ any of this make you rethink medicine?”

She makes a noise you can't interpret and puts her hands back on the railing. When she turns away, the ambient light hits her the right way. You can just see the tiny spine tattooed behind her ear. Or: you can see it because you know it's there. Aimee did it in Tony's lab the year before her apprenticeship, with Tony's supervision. Djene grounded both of them. She'd have grounded Tony too, if she could have.

“I want to help people,” says Mariam, finally. Shoulders up high, defensive. “I mean, that's what everybody in med school says, right? But I really, really want to help people. My thesis advisor talks a lot about how big a responsibility we'll have—life and death in our hands, right, that's huge. And nobody knows how they're going to handle having that kind of power until they get there. So, sure, maybe I could've taken the safe route and gone into forensic pathology instead—the worst I could do there if I went off my rocker is hug the morgue drawers and cackle—” You choke out a horrified laugh. She continues right over you: “—but, really? I think I've got a better idea than my classmates about the real scope of my responsibilities. Thanks to Mom and Bruce. And, well, you.”

You feel a sudden burst of admiration for this prickly cactus-girl. It figures: you and Mariam finally bond over something, and it's the horror story in your cells. You want to save the moment in a box so you can laugh about it later. Be cool, you tell yourself. Be nonchalant. Chill. Don't ruin it.

You're not good at being cool.

When you have your emotions under control, you say, much too earnestly, channelling Steve: “I'm really proud of you, Mariam.”

She flicks your hair into your face and goes inside.

But you saw: she was smiling.

 

* * *

 

By the time you drink a cup of tea and feed the dogs, it's close to dawn. Sleep, you decide, ain't in the cards. JARVIS hasn't updated you, but no news is good news. You may as well go to work.

A wall of music hits you when the lab door slides open. It turns down to a reasonable volume when you take a step inside.

You're not surprised that Tony is in the lab before you, but you are surprised that Bruce isn't there. His usual workstation is neat, unlit. Tony's bench has pieces of silver and blue metal all over it. You recognize Rhodey's spare suit, the knee casing: Tony's nose is practically inside it. Two jeweller's screwdrivers in his hand, another one sticking out of his mouth like a cigarette.

Tony looks up and sees your expression. He looks back inside the casing. Gestures in the vague direction of Bruce's station. “Yeah. It's a bad one.”

He doesn't tell you what the mission is, although you're sure he's looked. (Once an Avenger with a security complex, always an Avenger with a security complex.) You're grateful when he says nothing. If it's bad enough to need the Hulk, you don't need to know. It's better if you don't.

Steve will come home or he won't, and worrying won't change a damn thing.

DUM-E and U motor over while you're flicking your screens to life. You arrange the holograms to your liking with one hand and pat DUM-E with the other. It rests its claw on your knee. Happy warbles. U, jealous, steals one of your screens and runs away. You beckon the screen back and summon up a holographic ball instead. U flies past Tony after it, squealing.

“I'm going to trade you for a chihuahua,” Tony mutters around the screwdriver. “Smaller. Quieter. Better behaved.”

“Smellier,” you counter. DUM-E cuddles closer until you have half a robot in your lap. It hasn't seen you in almost a week, between the funeral and the weekend and the conference. God help you if you go away on vacation. DUM-E might try to hug Tony instead, and that isn't going to end well for anybody.

Your current project is difficult and behind schedule. At any other time, you'd be anxious about Steve. Now: you're glad to have a distraction. You're designing an arm for a Major Susanna Hadley, who was in Laos and is now in Georgia. Behind schedule, because you've been away. Difficult, because she has even less of her right shoulder than you do of your left. Unexploded ordinance disposal. Lucky to be alive, lucky to have what she does, but—difficult. A vacuum and braces will be too uncomfortable, and there isn't enough load-bearing bone for osseointegration. You've been trying to design a port that will give her optimal range of motion without straining her back. Not everyone is like you. Major Hadley doesn't have metal in her spine.

Despite the music, you find it unsettlingly quiet in the lab. It's been a long time since the whole team was called out. Tony is subdued. Bruce isn't here, swearing in Hindi under his breath or humming David Bowie songs. Clint isn't throwing his BTEs at Tony and shouting. Rhodey and Sam aren't hassling Tony to take a break and eat. There's a quiet desperation crawling under your skin. You want talk to fill the empty spaces, but you don't want to be the first one to open your mouth.

When the interns arrive, you breathe a sigh of relief.

They always come together. Carpooling—such as it is. Ruth's bright yellow scooter, her gardening gloves; Mohan's full-face helmet and his miles of legs in the sidecar. The first time you saw them come in together on the security feed, you laughed until your stomach hurt. Ruth and her vintage wool skirts and old-fashioned aviator goggles: a tiny librarian on the warpath. Mohan crammed into the sidecar with his knees around his ears. It was the funniest thing you'd ever seen.

It's less funny today. Mohan has shadows like valleys under his eyes. Ruth's makeup is half-hearted at best. You doubt either of them have been sleeping well.

Ruth stalks up to you with her jaw set and her eyes focused past you. She drops her bag and hugs you, almost like a punch. It nearly startles you off your drafting stool. You don't move for a whole handful of seconds. And then, awkwardly, working around the robot in your lap, you hug her back. You remember her reaching for you under the table. Acres of white around her eyes. You think: it's hard to be seen when you're vulnerable. In the raw. The HYDRA footage of you being scared is much harder to watch than the footage of you being hurt. You get it. For her sake, you pretend you don't.

When she walks stiff-backed to her station like nothing happened, Mohan is still standing next to your bench.

“You want a hug too?” you ask, and Mohan's lip twitches.

“Yeah, okay,” he says.

DUM-E grumbles and pinches you, upset that its perch is moving again. You pat Mohan's shoulder when you let him go. “If you ever need to talk,” you say, loud enough for Ruth to hear too.

“Thanks,” says Mohan.

“No, U, I do not need a dual power coupling,” says Ruth behind you. Tony shouts: “Doc!” as Djene walks through the door. The power coupling hits you in the head. DUM-E speeds away to avenge your honour. U flees directly into Tony's bench, scattering bits of War Machine across the floor. DUM-E crashes into U.

Business as usual, you think, and go untangle the robots.

 

* * *

 

“I was thinking about the Riots yesterday,” says Tony.

“Yeah?” you say neutrally.

Tony doesn't talk about the Registration Riots. You assume he has a lot of good reasons why it's a no-go zone, and you're not sure if you want to encourage him or distract him. While you wait him out, you peel back the holographic skin of Major Hadley's shoulder for what feels like the fortieth time. JARVIS helpfully illuminates the remaining nerves.

“The bitch of it all,” says Tony, “Is that the enhanced world was pretty much flying under the government radar before the Battle of New York. With a few exceptions, obviously. Me and my nemeses. Nemesises. Thor, kind of.” He flings his arms wide, scattering screens. “But then, suddenly, superheroes! And they're trying to save the city from a frankly _ridiculous_ threat, I mean, I don't think the entire US Army could have won the day, we needed superheroes, and not just for the aliens, because the WSC's _reasoned approach_ was to nuke Manhattan. Manhattan! A _nuke_!” Tony falls about himself. It's not really laughter, but it's close. “Reagan must have been spinning in his grave. A nuke. Christ.”

“Irony's kind of astounding,” you offer.

“Yeah,” he says. “Superheroes have to save New York from aliens _and_ the government. Amazing. But then the President gets kidnapped by AIM, and then the whole DC...thing, and people are talking about how superheroes might be _causing_ a lot of these problems, and maybe they're not totally wrong.”

“Cause and effect.”

“Right,” says Tony. “I almost took the other side, you know.”

That brings your head up. Major Hadley's transparent torso rotates away, sedately. You grab it before one of the robots can run off with it.

“The reasoning made sense.” Tony's looking at you instead of his workstation. Unusual; expectant. You move some of your screens out of the way so you can see him. His hands spread, fluttering. He can't keep still when he talks. “You want to know where all the sparky people are so you can keep an eye on them. You want to know where they live, what they're capable of, what they're doing. You don't want supers running around unchecked the same way you don't want civilians to have dirty bombs in their basements. It's a valid question, right? Should enhanced people be allowed to govern themselves? Who should make the rules? What happens if other supers don't like the rules? What happens if someone decides not to follow them?”

“2017,” you say, “Is what happens.”

Tony lifts one hand, theatrical: _he that speaketh the truth_. “Which made people scared, which made the government scared, which...etcetera.”

“Except,” you say, anticipatory.

“Except,” Tony agrees. “For me, it would have been—peanuts. I was already public, I don't think there's a term for just how _public_ I was, I think Happy had about sixteen ulcers all named after me—and at the end of the day, I was just a guy with a fancy tin can. But then I thought of Pepper, and Steve, and Bruce, and...others—” _and you_ , Tony doesn't say, but you hear it anyway, “—who can't just go home and take a suit off to be considered safe. So there's all these people, good people, just trying to be normal and not hurt anybody, and the government's asking them to go public, no exceptions, compliance or consequences—and here I am, pretending it's okay for me to dictate _their_ lives?” Tony shakes his head. “My old man would have flipped his shit. He was Jewish, did he ever tell you?”

You blink at him. “ _Howard_?” you ask. “He never mentioned.”

“Yeah, well. 1944 in Europe...probably wasn't the right time.” Tony pokes his screens; brings up a big black-and-white photo and flicks it towards you. It hovers in the space between your workstations. You hook it closer. A man in a homburg, and a beautiful upright woman Tony resembles to a startling degree. Nine small children, seven of them boys, but you recognize Howard immediately. It's in the chin, you think. And something about the eyes. Howard and Tony: those huge dark eyes. Unmistakable. You bat the photograph back to Tony, who disappears it.

Tony says, “He lost just about everybody who didn't come to America, minus some byblow third cousins in, I don't know, Denmark, so—he would've known better than most people that it never stops at registration. So there would've been privacy violations. And then prisons. And then—the next logical step. Because someone has to decide what, or who, constitutes a serious threat to humanity, and when they start making those calls on slimmer and slimmer evidence, just because somebody _might_ go off the rails someday—well, then you've got a daddy state that isn't afraid to throw innocent people into abattoirs because they're inconvenient.”

“You goin' somewhere with this?” you say. Too fast; defensive. You want to move the conversation somewhere else. All of this: it gives you nightmares. The thought of someone locking you away, again, because of what's in your blood—it scared you senseless then. Still does. You've had so many of your choices taken away. You don't remember, but Steve has told you: you were drafted. You do remember the cages in Kreischberg. You remember the table most of all. A little of what happened after. Your breaking. If the bill had passed, if they'd found you in 2018, made you come clean about your capabilities, it wouldn't even have been about the things HYDRA did with your hands. It wouldn't have been for your crimes. It would have been punishment for letting someone turn you into a gun.

“Patience, grasshopper,” says Tony. “See, I was thinking about all of that because Monday was the perfect example for why the whole Registration Act clusterfuck wouldn't have _worked_. I mean, I get where they're coming from, self-policing has historically been an awful idea, gaze long into the abyss, yadda yadda, but if that kid really wanted to hurt me, powers or no powers, he'd have found a way. It's like we didn't learn anything from Project Insight. We can't persecute people just because they could possibly do something wrong in the long squishy future.”

“Preaching to the choir,” you say.

Tony rolls his eyes. “I know, why do you think I'm talking to you? My _point_ is, people like that kid need help and support, not—” An inarticulate gesture. “Not having a stigma and a serial number stamped on their foreheads for something they didn't choose in the first place.”

“O...kay, this is sounding a lot less theoretical,” you say warily. You check your peripheral vision. Mohan is in the auxiliary lab. Djene and Ruth have their heads bent together over the printer hub. Distance and distraction. You relax a little. “You want to, what, go talk the kid down from the Supervillain Ledge?”

“No,” says Tony. “I think _you_ should go talk the kid down from the Supervillain Ledge.”

You point at yourself and raise your eyebrows: _me?_

Tony makes a clicking noise with his tongue. “Sure. You're better with people—no, hey, stop with the face, I can flirt, I can sales-pitch, I am the _best_ at sales-pitch, but not so much the interpersonal feely-whatever. You're...” A series of finger motions that are probably meant to convey superior social skills but look more like innuendo. “Good. At the thing. The empathy thing.”

You put your chin on one hand and look at him. You say: “Tony.” He opens his mouth but you beat him to it. “Tony, pretty much the first goddamn thing you did when we met was empathize with me.”

“Yes, and it made me _very uncomfortable_ , let's never talk about it again.”

You sigh. “Okay, then let's talk about how little this kid's gonna want to swap nuts and bolts with guy who crushed his hand.”

“I just think you're the right guy for the job, that's all. You're, you know.”

It hits you, what he means. You stare at him.

“No, no way, I'm not coming out of the—” You look; the interns are out of range. You lower your voice anyway: “—out of the _supersoldier closet_ to the guy I _mangled_ , Tony, god—”

“I'm not saying that, I'm just saying, you know where he's coming from, right, with the wanting payback and the—”

“No,” you say, sharper than you mean. “I never did. You got me confused with somebody; _Steve's_ the one still out there setting the world on fire. I never—I ain't about that.” Placating, because Tony looks nervy: “Vengeance just makes you stupid. It means they still own you.”

“See,” and Tony's pointing again, this time with a stylus, “ _That's_ why I think you should talk to him. That's what I meant.”

“That the hill you want to die on?” You roll your eyes; you roll your whole head with it. “Christ alive. I'll think about it, okay? I still think it's a dumb idea.”

“That is literally all I wanted to hear,” says Tony, and puts his nose back into a gauntlet.

You shake your head, fond. “I need to stop letting you win arguments.”

“Probably.”

“Definitely.”

Silence, so: you call your own work back up. Major Hadley's shoulder appears on top, reproachfully. You blow it up huge, send it rotating slowly. You had almost a whole workable plan for the anchoring, ten minutes ago, and you wish you'd laid markers. You'll have to start over.

“I still think they had the right idea,” says Tony suddenly. You look up. “The SHRA people, I mean. Keeping superheroes accountable. That's the core of the whole hoopla, right? Your peacekeeping agencies need to have oversight, just like the military, just like the police force, and the Avengers or _whoever_ shouldn't get to be special snowflakes. I still believe that. It's just—kind of hard to know who they should be accountable to. We're still ferreting out HYDRA in the _Senate_ , they busted someone in September, for god's sake.”

“World's never going to be perfect, Tony,” you say. Joints, nerves, scar tissue. Broken things everywhere you look. You reach under the scapula, pinching. “We do the best we can. That's all. Everybody's doing their best.”

“I don't know how you turned out like this,” Tony grumbles. “Out of the two of you, how you ended up the insufferable optimist, I will never fucking understand.”

 _I hope you never have to, pal_ , you think, and wave DUM-E over for an extra hand.

 

* * *

 

You open the suite door on Aimee and Mariam with their backpacks.

“Hang on,” you say, “Let me grab the girls, I'll walk you out.”

Mariam suffers through with eyerolling. Aimee takes the dogs so you can take the bags. They probably think you're old fashioned, but it's just practical. You can clean-and-jerk over six hundred pounds. Their bags: nothing. Aimee shouldn't be lifting anything, and there's no reason Mariam should destroy her back with textbooks more than she already does. Outside the front doors, you wave off the SI driver and handle the doors yourself.

“You'll be all right?” says Aimee, through the window. _Without Steve?_ she doesn't say, tactfully. She doesn't wait for a response: “If you need anything—”

“You're supposed to be _resting_ ,” Mariam hisses, at the same time you say: “Don't worry about me, sweetheart, focus on you.” Aimee puts her hands over her face and groans.

“Make her sit down and watch a movie,” you tell Mariam. “A _few_ movies,” and you thump the top of the car twice before you step back.

The last you see of them is Mariam saluting with the wrong hand.

You run Josie and Clara through the evening crush to Bryant Park. You always go past the NYPL lions: you actually have a memory of them, before the war. You and Steve, probably not long after you met, sitting on Patience when it was still named Lady Astor. You can't remember what you were talking about, and neither can Steve. You like it, that he can't. It makes it feel more normal. Everyone has gaps in their memory, childhoods especially, and here you're no different. Sometimes you like to imagine the conversation, pretend it was deep and far-sighted and brave, but in seriousness you doubt it. Eight or ten: you were probably talking about baseball.

Past the lions, the park. A little shock of green. You take the dogs here at least three times a week, but they still have to sniff everything. Every tree, every garden chair, every brick. Clara sees a border collie she wants to meet; she weaves behind you and around Josie and nearly knocks you on your ass.

“Get a greyhound,” you mutter, hauling her back. “Low energy. Very docile. Quiet temperament.” The border collie sees Clara and practically inflates: _friend!_ What follows is inevitable. Josie hides behind your legs. You smile at the collie's owner: what can you do, right? She grins back.

On a whim, you make a big circle to the market on East 45th. You help a small old man reach bell peppers, leaning over the heads of two children squabbling over the perfect lemon. After you get mangoes, peaches, salmon, the knobbly bread Steve likes, you look for weirdness. You and Steve have a rule: every grocery run has to contain something you've never had before. Since he isn't here, you pick something for him to try when he gets back. Aged cheddar made with whiskey for you; a chocolate bar with lime in it for Steve. You have at least three jokes prepared about how it's perfect, because he's a bitter pill.

He'll probably only punch you a little.

 

* * *

 

This is not about you:

Your first aikido session does not go well.

While Nell, the instructor, is still talking, before she even gets a hand near you, you go numb and far away. Something she says drops you into the well. It terrifies you to think about the kind of situation where you'll have to use this information. You don't want to be there again.

Nell sees it right away. You're embarrassed to be so obvious. And then you remember: Carl told you she works with trauma victims sometimes.

“Sorry,” you say anyway. You sit on a balance beam and drag a hand down your face. “Sorry.”

“It's all right, Jim,” says Nell. “Tell me how I can help.”

She doesn't sit down next to you, but stands at a respectable distance. Loose pose. Thumbs tucked into the sides of her exercise tights, those strange impractical half-pockets all women's pants seem to have. She lifts one foot and curls her toes under like a ballerina.

“I was,” you say, and stop. You don't know how to handle this. You didn't think you'd need to. Your fake self is a civilian. Jim Bauer lost his arm in a childhood car accident. Jim Bauer has never been in a combat situation. Jim Bauer has never needed to explain why he avoids punching bags. You can't say: I was a soldier. You can't say: I was a hostage. You can't say: I was abused. They're not true. They're all the wrong truths.

“Jim. It's okay.” You look up. Nell, smiling. Sympathetic. Drawing her own conclusions. You feel guilty, and then you feel relieved. “If something makes you anxious, we'll come at it sideways until we can hit it head-on. If it takes a long time, that's fine. If we never get there, that's fine too. I'll push you, but you can push back. We'll work out boundaries as we go. Okay?”

“Okay,” you say.

You spend two hours on what Nell calls body management. Peripheral awareness. Strategic motion. She doesn't touch you; she doesn't ask you to touch her. She talks, and she moves, and you move with her. It's harder than you expect. The smell of gym mats doesn't bother you these days, but the new combination of gym-mat-smell-plus-trainer hauls you back to bad places. Nell is loud and quick to laugh and has cheerful tattoos on her arms. She shouldn't remind you of them. She shouldn't, but something does.

You think: this should be easy. You know how to fight, how to block, how to sense proximity to the inch. But if you think about it, you never fought like this. Like your body was something worth protecting. Like your opponent was worth leaving alive. You've seen the footage. The Soldier fought like a bull, like a rabid dog, like something that shouldn't have been off its leash. The awareness Nell is trying to teach you, the fluidity, the care—it's foreign and familiar at the same time. It nauseates you. Makes you dizzy. Your brain wants you to run. Your bones want you to bring down the roof.

When it's over, you're clammy and exhausted. You feel like a limp rag. Nell tells you to go home, take a long hot bath, drink something decaffeinated, watch a favourite movie. She reminds you to call Carl if you need to. She asks if you have someone at home, and you tell her yes, but you're sort of lying. (You have the dogs. It's not what she's asking.) You just want to get out of the gym.

On the couch, you drop and curl into yourself. Josie clamours onto you and wedges herself between your thighs and calves, knobby deer-legs splayed. You shake like you're sick. You go away for a while.

When you blink back into yourself, your shaking has stopped. You realize: it's warmer in the suite. Soothing music is playing in another room as if someone else is home. JARVIS looking after you. You can't bring yourself to speak, so you sign _thank you_ at the air.

“You are welcome, sir,” says JARVIS quietly.

You close your eyes again.

You wake up sweat-crusted and sore and ravenously hungry. Also, a little ashamed of yourself. You know better by now: never let inertia drag you to the floor without showing your teeth. You know the difference between misery and self-pity, how it feels in your chest. Groaning like an old man, you fix your woes in order of importance. Calories first—calories are always first. Like putting the oxygen mask on yourself before putting on a child's. If you faint, nothing else will get done. You sit on the counter and blow steam off your tea while you wait for the bathtub to fill.

You look back on the session and think: you hated every second of it. But you also know this: you'll go back. You'll go again and again until you no longer panic. Until Nell's is the only voice you can hear in your head. Until you can disarm someone without leaving a bruise. You're not a weapon. You're a human being with too much strength in your hands, and you need to learn this.

It's going to be hard. It might be the hardest thing you've done in years.

But it's not about you.

 

* * *

 

This is about you:

The ring arrives.

It was supposed to be delivered to Natalia's suite, for secrecy's sake. But: the team is away. Since Steve isn't home to wonder about it, JARVIS sends it to you via gopher. 

The robot offers you the package at the door. When you take it off the platter, the gopher spins in a circle, pipes a reveille that sounds suspiciously like the Wedding March, and scoots back to the elevator. You eye the nearest camera and decide not to make a rude gesture. You don't mind if JARVIS makes jokes at your expense, as long as he doesn't tell Tony.

You open the box, and you have to sit down.

Natalia agreed: it had to be gold. You couldn't imagine silver or titanium on Steve's hands. You know he'll have to take it off on missions; the metal's too soft to come anywhere near the shield. You don't mind, and you suspect he won't either. The one you chose is a heavy band with raised edges, and in between, carved: two hands supporting a heart. A claddagh, like his mother's wedding band. The one the museum gave back to him after he woke up, the one he keeps on a chain in his night-table. It's the only thing he has of hers. Everything else: sold, or lost to time.

It's hard to quantify the emotion you feel. If you were Steve, you think you'd understand. Steve told you how happy he was to find out that men could marry men, and women marry women. Like anything could happen, he said. Like the world was wide open. For him to come from then to now, with nothing in between—you can't imagine. He told you he knew when he was thirteen. He said he told you a year later. He said you didn't mind, except when he went out of his way to punch the kind of people who did.

But you: you don't know what you were, then. You can't remember. If you dreamed about men, you never told Steve. You loved him like your own flesh and blood, you know that much for certain. How could you not? But, you wonder: did you ever look at him and pine quietly, like a martyr? Did you ever wish you could sign a form and be his next of kin, no questions asked? Did he sleep with your hand on his struggling heart? You'll never know. Not unless someone finds a journal or a letter in their grandfather's attic: your missing parts writing to you from beyond the grave. Handing you the things you dropped, getting here.

It doesn't matter, you think, shaking off the past. It doesn't matter what the James Barnes of 1937 felt. It doesn't matter what the James Barnes of 1943 wanted. It's just you, now, with a ring box in your hand and salt on your cheeks. You hope you're honouring them, your younger selves, but this is for you. For what you wanted when you clawed yourself up out of the ice.

Your grin has too many teeth in it, your face still wet to the jaw.

It's a victory, and the rest doesn't matter.

 

* * *

 

You're alone in the lab with Tony when JARVIS says, “The Quinjet has landed safely on the roof, Sir. Agent Romanoff is piloting.”

“Let me guess,” says Tony. “Clint isn't piloting because he did something stupid.”

JARVIS plays a quiet gear-clicking noise. It's his way of letting listeners know that he's computing and can't answer immediately. Like hold music. JARVIS doesn't have a face, so: body language in sound. You asked him once, _Why gears?_ JARVIS told you, _The novelty amuses._

“Agent Barton has dislocated his left elbow and sprained his right wrist,” says JARVIS. “I am informed that he reduced the joint himself and resisted appropriate treatment on board. He is currently on his way to Medical over Captain Rogers's shoulder.”

“How's everyone else?” you ask, because it doesn't look like Tony is going to stop laughing anytime soon.

“Agent Hill has been treated for a minor burn to the left arm. Major Wilson has been treated for minor contusions. Agent Romanoff has refused treatment for a strained muscle in her back. Thor, Dr. Banner, Captain Rogers, and Colonel Rhodes are uninjured. ”

“Go get your boy, Boy Wonder,” says Tony.

“I'll have to start over if I don't finish this,” you say. You put your hands back in the code. “Besides, he'll probably stay with Clint until he's sure there won't be any spontaneous breakouts.”

“Or until Sam gets there.”

“Same difference,” you say, and yank out a whole segment for debugging.

It's nearly 18:00 by the time you leave the lab. Steve, JARVIS tells you in the elevator, has been in the suite for fifty-one minutes. He could be napping, but you go to the living room on a hunch. It's Steve's favourite place in the evening.

You stop in the doorway. The room is lit like maple syrup. Bright and warm. Steve is on the window ledge with one leg tucked under himself, fingers resting just so on the rim of his mug, still as a model. Sitting in exactly the right place: the light through one of Darcy's handmade crystal strands hitting him like a laser. A splash of rainbow on his forehead. A fresh scrape on the hinge of his jaw.

You feel something that's almost too bright to be happiness. Too sharp. It cuts your heart to ribbons.

The ring is in the storage compartment of your arm. Under a panel in your wrist, wrapped up in a bit of soft fabric to keep it from clinking around when you move. You're not wearing your cover. It would be the simplest thing in the world to kneel at Steve's feet, take the mug from his hands and replace it with your fingers. You look at the light on his eyelashes and think: there will never be a better moment than this.

When you come and stand next to him, he looks up and smiles. You sit down: your knees against his knees.

“Steve,” you say. Not much more than a whisper. You don't want to shatter the peace, the light like sugar, the quiet. You open your mouth to say the right words.

But what comes out instead is: “Wanna go for a walk?”

You wish you could smack yourself in the brain. What is even wrong with you.

Luckily, Steve doesn't notice.

“On a beautiful evening, back in New York, catching up with my best guy for the first time in two weeks?” Steve grins. “I don't know, Buck.”

You try to shoot him an unimpressed look and probably fail. “Don't make me get the backpack leash, Rogers.”

Steve laughs and leans forward. You meet him halfway. His lips are dry in the way that means he didn't get enough water during the mission. You tap the bottom of his mug when you pull away. He drinks the rest of his tea before you let him stand.

 

* * *

 

“You were kidding about the backpack leash, right?” Steve asks, as you walk down the Esplanade with the dogs.

“Nope. It's in my sock drawer. Gonna give it to Aimee.”

“It's not the shield, is it?”

“It's definitely the shield,” you say. You saw a toddler bumbling around in Central Park wearing one last month. You thought you were going to die.

“That's...” Steve trails off. “Okay, that's kind of adorable, actually.”

“Bet I wished I'd had one for you in '25,” you say, and Steve doesn't bother denying it.

Steve's hands are in his jacket pockets, and you're walking right next to him, but he's too far away. You tuck your hand over his elbow. He shoots you an amused, tolerant look; lots of eyebrow. You bat your eyelashes at him to make him laugh. Ahead of you: three children taking turns petting a dignified old bulldog. Clara perks up; Steve gives her leash a friendly jerk, and she chooses the path of greater dignity. A bicyclist passes all in neon green. The ferry blatting out over the water, crisp, and then: like a stepped-on goose. You both snort.

“Somebody needs to tune that horn,” says Steve.

“I dunno, maybe it'll bring some joy to those rich assholes who bitch about the river noise,” you say. “It's hard to be serious when—” and it goes again: _wonk_! Steve, laughing. “ _See_?”

“Aw, Buck, you know those sorta people, they'll always find something new to complain about.”

“Least it wouldn't be that,” you say, looking out over the water. Evening kayakers darting around the larger boats. A far-off raspberry noise. “Jesus, somebody put it out of its misery. How was the mission?”

“Good,” says Steve. He makes a face. “Well, not good, it was awful, but no civilian casualties worse than a broken leg, so. Counting it as a success. What'd you get up to while I was gone?”

“Dogs, groceries, work,” you say, and you're about to elaborate when he sighs. “What? Okay, tough guy: I took a rocket ship to Mars, where I met some little green men who invited me in for coffee, except _coffee_ in Martian means something _entirely_ —”

“I'm thinking of retiring,” says Steve.

You stop. Right there in the middle of the boardwalk. Your wrist still hooked under Steve's elbow, so he stumbles. Spins around to face you. Your hand on his coat. The dogs prance around your legs, tangling their leashes.

You say: “What?”

Steve smiles. It's not sad. It's not not-sad, either. “It's,” he says, reaching for your right hand, fumbling for it: you give it to him. His strong fingers, squeezing. “I've been thinking about it for a while,” he says. “You know, the team, it's—bigger, now. Better than when we started. Less ego. More cohesive. Especially since I let Nat take over calling the shots last year.”

“You've been planning for this,” you say. Your voice echoes strangely in your own head. “You've been getting the team ready for—”

“Yeah.” Then: a real smile. “When Tony stepped down, I was real worried, but Rhodey's just as good—better, actually. Not that I'd ever say that around Tony.” You snort. A little stiffness draining out of your spine. “Anyway, it got me thinking. About life outside of the Avengers, and. I don't think it'll be permanent? More like an extended sabbatical.” Steve shrugs. “I never wanted to be a soldier forever, Buck. Someone else can take the shield for a while. And I can take some time to think about what I want to do with all this life I got. Who I want to spend it with.”

It's funny how joy can make you feel like you're drowning.

“Steve,” you say. You clap your hands on either side of his face. Grinning: and so are you. “Steve,” you say, like it's the only word you have left. Your brain cranks to life. “Steve, that's fantastic. What're you gonna do?”

“I have no idea. Take classes? You got me going with your fancy degree, thought about following suit. Maybe—travel? Would you wanna travel?”

“Hell, I'm game for anything.”

“I figured,” says Steve, wicked: _of course, you schmuck, like you'd want to do something I didn't_. You raise your eyebrows: why'd you ask, then, goofus?

Big stupid grins, both of you. Christ, you love this dumb punk so much it guts you. It scares you to pieces. All of the ways it could have ended up, and here you are. Awake in the city that never sleeps, together, after everything, after history. If you ever stop being completely astonished by that, if you ever stop being grateful—that'll be the day you don't deserve him anymore. It brings you to your goddamned knees.

“Steve,” you say. Low and fervent: saying your prayers. “I gotta ask you—”

Your phone makes a noise like a car alarm.

It scares the absolute life out of you, and Steve as well. Both of you, flinching like cats. You yank it out of your pocket and look at the screen.

It's Tony.

Sweat breaks out on your spine.

Tony never calls. He always texts. The only other time he's called you was from the hospital, three years ago, when everybody's comms shorted out and Steve got shot in the neck and almost died. You felt this way then, too: like your heart was going to stop. You think of Natalia. You think of Clint. You think of Aimee.

You grab Steve's elbow and answer on speakerphone.

“You need to get back to the Tower, right now,” says Tony. His voice steady, flint-hard. “Some HYDRA exec in minimum security lock-up managed to see pictures of you leaving the conference.”

You have two seconds of silence to process that. And then:

“He just outed you as the Winter Soldier.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BTEs: behind-the-ear hearing aids.
> 
> An anon recently asked me what Josie and Clara look like, so: [this](http://www.easypetmd.com/sites/default/files/Greyhound%20%281%29.jpg) is the picture I've been using in my head. I've also neglected to mention that Josie is named after the inimitable [Josephine Baker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Baker); ditto Clara, after the dreamy [Clara Bow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Bow). Be still my beating heart.
> 
> My Jewish Howard headcanon (aside from, lbr, being Jewish my own self) comes courtesy of [this excellent Tumblr thread](http://magpieandwhale.tumblr.com/post/109394378535/reasons-mcu-howard-stark-was-an-ashkenazi-jew).
> 
> Last but not least: a [claddagh](http://www.cmjewellers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Cladagh-300x300.jpg).


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I'm not telling you this,” says Pepper, “To remind you that Steve would do anything for the people he cares about. You know that. I'm telling you to make it _crystal clear_ that I will not allow this piece of _garbage_ to ruin your life. Is that understood?”
> 
> “Perfectly, ma'am,” you say weakly.

It takes both of your not-inconsiderable skills to get back to the Tower, dogs in tow, without being spotted. The streets are full of news vans. One big snarl of vehicles, cameras, and shouting for three blocks around the Tower. The only way in is through Grand Central Station: a series of unused service corridors lighting up in succession on your phone. Steve breaks down one door with his shoulder. You pick the locks of two others with a bobby pin and a thin nail you find on the floor. Your heart in your mouth. It's not the running that gets you. It's the stopping.

The last door is bolted like a bank vault.

Just as you and Steve come screeching up short, it swings open. Tony silhouetted in the doorway. You've never been so glad to see a Stark in all your days. He waves you through and slams it behind you. You drop the leashes and bend over, hands on your knees, catching your breath. The dogs pant and skitter unhappily around you. Adrenaline constricting your throat. You push the fear down to your toes. You are steel, steel, steel.

“How bad is it?” Steve asks over your head. His fingers on your spine. You hear him yank off his watch cap with his other hand. He drops his sunglasses.

“Not as bad as it could be, but it's chum hour at the piranha pool,” says Tony. “I think every papparazzo between Yonkers and Newark is camped on my front porch, Security's got the crawling horrors, I think Happy's about to bust out the vats of boiling oil. I'll send Thor down as a distraction, he'll talk their collective ears off.”

“Man's got the gift of blarney,” says Steve. “Okay, I should—”

“Not a damn thing, Rogers,” you say, straightening. Steve sets his jaw, so you poke him in the sternum. “This ain't your call to make. _I'm_ going to go talk to Pepper, maybe the PR gals—”

“Ms. Potts and Agent Hill are working in Conference Room D,” says JARVIS. “Shall I inform them of your imminent arrival?”

“Please,” you say. You turn back. “Steve, I love you, but I'm about to lose my shit, so we're gonna go up there and let the two most terrifyingly competent people we know tell us exactly what to do, okay?”

“You got it,” says Steve, and yanks you into a hug. You stiffen reflexively, and then you relax. Your face tucked into his neck, your hands on his jacket. Leather and salt and aftershave. You try to slow your thundering heart. You can do this.

You have to.

In the conference room, Pepper and Maria sit at opposite ends of the table. They scare you in completely different ways. Maria: a sports bra and Super Mario pajamas, staring down an array of screens with the grin of the deranged. Pepper: a skirt and blazer, purple-black like a bruise, lapels sharp as razors and an expression to match. It gentles a little when she sees you in the doorway.

“James, come in,” she says. “Yes, it's a media circus, but it's honestly not as bad as it looks. Where's Steve?”

“Taking the dogs home,” you say. You let her steer you into a chair. “I think he needed a minute to calm down.”

Pepper's face softens further. She crosses her legs; adjusts the line of her skirt over her knees. “Have I ever told you how we met? Steve and I?”

You shake your head.

“Bear with me, it's relevant to all this,” says Pepper. “So, we'd run into each other a few times in the halls, of course—exchanged pleasantries. I thought he was very sweet and very sad. I kept planning to corral him into some children's media gigs, but with all the post-Avengers chaos, it never quite happened. And then, that December—” She pauses. Picks up a pen and fiddles with it. “How much do you know about Extremis?”

“Biological enhancement agent developed by AIM,” you say. “Used by the people who kidnapped President Ellis in...”

You trail off, your mouth open. Between Pepper's fingers, the barrel of the pen is beginning to soften. A light under her skin like molten glass. She drops the pen into a metal wastebasket before it can drip onto her skirt.

“President Ellis wasn't the only person AIM kidnapped,” says Pepper.

“I'm so sorry,” you whisper.

Pepper shakes her head. You recognize the gesture because you use it: _it's in the past_. “Tony never told you?”

“I knew something happened, but not the details,” you venture. “Things Tony said—that ten-month absence the journalists always bring up when they bitch about your _meteoric rise to power_ ,” you say, air quoting.

“I survived,” says Pepper. Calm: just stating facts. She smiles. “Tony stabilized the virus, and I took some time to recover, but when I came back—well, internal security in those days wasn't really as tight as we would've liked, with all the chaos. I don't know if it was a leak, an eyewitness, or what, but agents claiming to be from SHIELD showed up in my office one day and wouldn't take no for an answer. They never quite clarified whether they wanted to use my powers for purposes unknown, or pin me in a box like a bug, but either way, they said, they couldn't in good conscience allow something like me free run.”

The chair's arms make a warning creak under your hands. You put them in your lap instead. Pepper smiles: thin but amused.

“It happened that Steve was on the same floor,” she continues, “And JARVIS decided to ask him to visit me instead of calling security. He...may have implied that I was in very immediate danger, though, so Steve burst through the door like a battering ram, shield in hand—it was very majestic—and he said, _Gentlemen, you got ten seconds to get your fucking hands away from her—sorry, ma'am—or I will goddamn well move you myself—sorry_.”

You pinch the bridge of your nose. Your shoulders moving: silent laughter. “That's Steve,” you say.

“The agents,” says Pepper, “Then proceeded to make terrible life choices.”

“Guns,” you guess.

“Guns,” she agrees. “Steve looked at me and said, _Ms. Potts?_ and I said, _Yes, Captain Rogers,_ and...” She spreads her hands, then folds them in her lap. “Between the two of us, that was the last time anyone tried that kind of cowboy nonsense.”

Pepper leans forward and presses both of your hands between hers. Her grip astonishes you. Light banking up in her throat; fading.

“I'm not telling you this,” says Pepper, “To remind you that Steve would do anything for the people he cares about. You know that. I'm telling you to make it _crystal clear_ that I will not allow this piece of _garbage_ to ruin your life. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly, ma'am,” you say weakly.

“Speaking of that lamentable waste of carbon,” says Maria, “I've just discovered Bradshaw's been put in solitary for his own safety. That's cute. I think I'll call Natasha and see if she wants to play Good Cop.”

“Take the Flathead, Tony says it needs some road hours.” The door hisses open behind you. Pepper looks up from her phone. “Oh, Steve, good. We can get started.”

You start to move, but he's already there, his hand on the back of your neck. It slides to the side of your face as you turn. You lean into it, heavy. When he kneels down, you press your forehead against his, breathing the same air. His hand is shaking, but you don't think it's fear.

“Take a seat,” says Pepper, kindly. “We've got a lot to get through.”

Steve drags the nearest office chair over. You reach for his hand at the same time he reaches for yours. Your knuckles rap painfully before you can find the slots between his fingers.

“Right,” says Pepper. “Recap. In 2014, during the final hour of Project Insight, Natasha released the SHIELD database onto the internet. By October, all of the data was decrypted and circulated—including the digital Winter Soldier files in HYDRA's possession. In June, a panel of experts in criminal law, psychology, and neurology met to determine whether the Winter Soldier could be held accountable for crimes committed while under HYDRA control. They concluded that the Winter Soldier, if he was still alive, acted under extreme duress, and was therefore as much a victim of HYDRA as any of his targets. So—James. Remember. They can't send you to jail. You're safe.”

“I know,” you say. “That ain't—” You let a long, slow breath out. It whistles. “I believe you, but my lizard-brain doesn't.”

“Even if it goes pear-shaped,” says Steve, “Some—crazy sequence of events, the world turns upside down, whatever—they won't have you. I won't let that happen.”

“It's not going to happen, but part of why SI is unquestionably the best in world security is because we always make contingency plans for the impossible,” Pepper adds. “I have understaffed labs in Vancouver and Hong Kong that could both use a qualified prosthetist. Failing that, we have secure properties in Wales, Seoul, and Zagreb. Should it come down to deep cover, you'll be well taken care of—but it won't. Anyway, here's the interesting thing: the HYDRA exec who outed you? Bradshaw? Actually outed _Jim Bauer_.”

You and Steve both startle. You look at each other.

“He doesn't know who I really am?” you ask her.

“Apparently not,” says Pepper. “Keep in mind that Bradshaw was, relatively speaking, low-level. Your actual identity could have compromised HYDRA integrity. We have to assume that Pierce knew who you really were, but there's nothing about it in the American files, so if he did know, he kept it very close to the chest.”

“And nobody recognized Bucky when the files were released?” Steve asks.

Pepper shakes her head. “We've tracked any mention of it since 2015. A few people flailing on conspiracy theory forums— _hey, this guy looks an awful lot like Sergeant Barnes from the Howlies_ , that sort of thing—but those discussions mostly devolved into name-calling and lunacy. Nobody credible. Steve, you have to remember that there's a reason you were the first person in decades to identify him.”

“The serum changed my bone structure, same as you,” you remind Steve. “And I'd been tortured, lost my body language—honestly, I'm amazed you _did_ recognize me.”

“Eidetic memory,” says Steve, shrugging. “Anyway, I—guess that's good.”

“It is,” Pepper agrees. She looks at you. “We have more information than the people trying to discredit you, which means we have an advantage. Anyone trying to make you look bad is eventually going to have to face the fact that you're an American war hero. We'll want to play that hand, but it's your call as to when and how.”

“If I gotta, I gotta,” you say. “What else do we have to work with?”

“Predominantly, the HYDRA files the Avengers recovered between 2014 and 2017,” says Pepper. “Plus Nat's Russian files. They include much more explicit medical records, usage manuals, Dr. Zola's notes, the bill of sale—”

Steve makes a wounded noise. The way he tenses afterwards makes you think it was involuntary.

“It helps,” says Pepper firmly. “Steve, it really helps. The more horrifying the evidence is, I'm sorry to say, the better this will spin. American citizens bought a cryogenically frozen human being like they were mailing off for a magazine. It's clear that James had exactly zero input on anything that was happening to him.”

“I know, I know, just—” Steve puts his face in his hands. Muffled: “Shit.”

You rub his back. “He never saw the recovered files,” you tell Pepper. Her eyebrows hit the roof. “Minus Nat's, I mean. I wouldn't let him. It's bad enough it happened to me, he shouldn't have to fucking live with it.”

“It's going to be all over the news if we release the secondary files,” she says, gentle for Steve's sake, and you want to hug her.

“We'll manage,” you say.

You think: I should be angry. But all you can feel is fear. You've become so accustomed to anonymity. Even in the war, cameras followed you around, because they followed Steve. Yesterday, for seven years of yesterdays, no one knew your name. If anyone did, it was just as Jim from the Tower, Jim and his dogs in the park, good old Jim who always buys maple turkey sausage from the market on Saturdays. Your reputation did not precede you: you had no reputation. Steve is the one who wears disguises when he walks with you. Shapeless jackets, beanie hats, big sunglasses. Not you. You were nobody.

Tonight, you're somebody.

It's almost enough to make you take the property in Zagreb, just on principle.

“We have a press conference scheduled for the morning,” says Pepper. “Jiang from Legal is working with the PR team to prepare a statement—you'll have a chance to vet that before it goes live, and you have the final word on anything in it. It'll include a request for privacy and a reminder that you're a recovering POW, which should buy us some time to get a general picture of media focus, determine what direction we should take, establish a reasonable level of security; the usual.”

“You're a goddess,” you say, and Pepper grins like a shark.

“Go on,” she says. “Get some rest—both of you. My best people will be on this right through till dawn.” She puts one hand on your knee; the other on Steve's. “It'll be okay.”

“Thanks a million,” you say, and you almost believe her.

 

* * *

 

“I think the girls are going to camp in front of the television all night,” says Djene, when she calls you ten minutes later. “It's 2012 all over again, except less cute, because they're probably not going to pass out on their Squishables this time.”

You juggle the phone against your shoulder as you feed the dogs. “So you were all big talk with that tranq gun, huh?”

“You caught me,” she admits. “How are you holding up?”

“Anxious,” you say. “But probably not as much as Bradshaw. Maria and Nat should be staring him down about now. Is it bad if that makes me feel a little better?”

“Honey, you are _justified_. I bet half the Tower wants to do unspeakable things to that man's reproductive organs.”

“Line forms behind Steve.”

“Ooo,” says Djene, low. “On a scale of one to ten, how angry are we talking?”

“ 'Bout thirteen,” you say. “He's down in the gym with Thor, working it off.”

“Maman had a saying for times like these,” she says. “ _Mali be lombo lamba, ng'a t'i fili_ —strong winds can rock a canoe, but they can't sink it.” She pauses. “Granted, she said it every time the satellite dish broke, so you can take it with a heaping grain of salt, but the sentiment's a good one. _Tough times don't last, tough people do_ , and all that.”

“Не́ было бы сча́стья, да несча́стье помогло́—if not for misfortune, I'd have no luck at all,” you say. “I got no shortage of platitudes, Doc. It's applying them that's giving me the shakes.”

“You're the strongest person I've ever met,” says Djene, with a faith that makes you cover your eyes with your hand.

 

* * *

 

It's Steve, this time, who curls up small and asks for shelter. He comes in on the near side of midnight. Tape residue on his fingers, blood on his knuckles, blood on the sheets. You don't care.

“Keep thinking I've seen the worst of human behaviour,” Steve whispers. A little nasally, like maybe he's been crying. “But that asshole wasn't trying to get special treatment in prison or anything. He just wanted to wreck your life. Who does that? _Why_?”

You say nothing. You tighten your arm around him.

You don't know which is worse, if you're honest. Using another human being for personal gain—or wanting to hurt someone for no reason at all. Where does Bradshaw fall on the spectrum of evil? What did he hope to achieve? Attention?

If that was what he wanted, you think, he got it. In the form of Maria and Nat.

You're pretty sure that wasn't the kind of attention he was looking for.

“You always gave the best hugs,” Steve mumbles.

You swallow hard. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Even when I was small—you gave these fantastic rib-cracking bear-hugs. You never treated me like I was fragile. I never told you how much I appreciated that.”

“You're telling me now, champ,” you say. You hold onto him until your muscles burn.

 

* * *

 

Steve's hand on your shoulder brings you out of a dream. Something tells you it's too early for higher brain functions. You swat him off. Steve, laughing. You fall back to sleep.

When you wake up for real, Steve isn't in the suite, and it's almost eight. Your phone says you have twenty-two missed text messages. Sympathetic and angry: Sam, Clint, Darcy, Bruce. The one from Maria says: _Dicklord broke like a pencil_. Natalia's just says:  >:( 

There's breakfast waiting for you in the oven. You eat, and then you search for Steve.

You find him in the Avengers common room with Tony. Both of them: standing in identical positions. Arms crossed, glaring at the TV screen. Next to the newscaster, a looping video of you in 2014, stalking DC with a small armoury strapped to your body. You look so pale under the mask. Like something that's lived its whole life in a cave. White and blind. You want to lay your past self in a sunbeam until the ice melts.

“Rumours that the Winter Soldier has been living in hiding as camera-shy Stark technician Jim Bauer have gone unsubstantiated—”

“Shy?” says Tony. “Did she _see_ your performance at the convention?”

“Ssh,” says Steve.

“—morning, a representative from Stark Legal will be hosting a press conference to address the claims. I'd like to take the opportunity to welcome our guest, Dr.—”

“Turn that shit off,” you say. Steve and Tony both jump. JARVIS blacks the screen. “PR team's on it, you don't need to stress yourselves.”

“Just wanted the lay of the land,” says Tony. “Most networks are focusing on the torture thing, not the murder thing, so—yay?”

“Fabulous,” you deadpan. “Stevie? Can I get a moment?”

You tug him into the coat room. This might be the only chance you'll get until after the press conference, and even then—you don't know if you'll see him after. You might not see him for a while. There might not be time.

“Steve,” you say, and then you stop. He waits for you. Patient, but: he looks as nervous as you feel. “I don't know how it's going to go today,” you try, “So I got to—I wanna ask if you'll—”

Tony's head pops into the doorway.

“Hey, James Bond, Pepper's ready for you, she says the statement's ready for vetting. Chop chop.”

You sigh, right from the bottom of your toes.

“Later, okay?” says Steve. “I'll be here. I promise. It's gonna be okay.”

JARVIS directs you to the little recovery room off Pepper's primary office. It has an old chaise lounge and two squashy chairs. Dark, soundproofed, a carpet like clouds. No windows. You know she takes a meditation break in here every day at 14:00.

“Hi,” says Pepper. “I hope you slept okay.”

“Yeah.” You sit down in the other chair. “Cheated, though. Took a sedative.”

“That's not cheating, that's just good battle tactics,” says Pepper. She admits: “I did too.”

She offers a single piece of paper. You take it from her and skim it; you don't expect you'll have to make any extraordinary changes. Pepper's people are very, very good at their jobs.

You stop reading. Your right hand is shaking. You switch the paper to the left and start from the beginning.

You finish.

You read it again.

“James? Are you okay?”

You want to say: no. You're not okay. Not even a little.

It's hitting you, now, what this statement is going to do. The file release. People are going to see more of you. All of you, all the rest. More missions, more videos, more experiment logs. The photographs you wouldn't let Steve see, like the ones where you're naked in a tiled room, wearing a layer of dried blood from the waist up. As if someone upended a bucket of paint over your head. No blood around your eyes, because you were wearing goggles. It's easy to see your expression. It's worse than the blood, you think. Your eyes: like a child. Confused and afraid and not dead at all.

They're all like that, the HYDRA files. The ones they didn't keep on SHIELD servers. The worst parts of you, what they did to you. Jiang is going to read a statement and your history will be public domain. Your memories narrated by someone else. Like always. It seems like you're forever fated to be one remove from your life.

You can't do this.

You can't _do_ this.

“James?”

“Pepper,” you say. “I'd l-like to—” You stop. Deep breaths. “I'd like to make a few changes. To the press release.”

“Of course,” says Pepper.

 

* * *

 

For the second time in as many weeks, you look out from behind a curtain. Deja-vu. There's a few differences. This isn't a theatre; more like a glorified gymnasium. This time, there are cameras. Waiting for Li Jiang of Stark Legal to come out and set the record straight. Monica from PR told you: social media has gone insane overnight. Has the Winter Soldier _really_ been working as an SI technician since 2014? Does Captain America know? Is this discrimination, picking on an amputee?

“It's time,” Jiang says. He looks calm, unruffled. Even cheerful. The statement, heavily red-penned, is a little crumpled in his hand. “Last chance to change your mind on any of it.”

“How do you not piss yourself every time you do this?” you ask him.

Jiang grins crookedly. “Practice. And it helps that it's never about me when I go out there.”

“Was that supposed to be a pep talk?”

“Do I look like a cheerleader?” Jiang shakes his head. Gestures with the statement. “This shouldn't be happening. We shouldn't have to do this. I've got nothing, bro.”

Your throat, closing. “Yeah.”

Jiang pats your arm supportively. You remember: he's a soccer coach in his spare time. You think about him standing and delivering. Cameras; kids. The balls on this guy. You wish you were half as brave.

“Whatever happens today—thank you. For your service.” Jiang puts his hand out. You stare at it, and then at him. “Reading between the lines is kind of what they pay me for. And, uh, I minored in military history. It's been an honour, Sergeant. God forbid, if you ever need someone to do another press release under less awful circumstances, I've got your back.”

“Thank you,” you manage. You shake his hand. “I—thanks.”

You watch him walk away, and you're alone. Panic tries to crawl up your spine. You shake out your arms, roll your neck, bounce on your heels like a boxer. You breathe in: slow. You breathe out: hard.

And then you walk onto the stage.

The river-mumble of human conversation stops.

It feels like a mile to the podium. You move like the soldier you used to be: straight back, squared shoulders, neutral expression. Like the mass of reporters stacked ten deep doesn't kill you a little inside. Like cameras aren't about to start flashing in your face. Security officers on either side of the stage. You wonder if they're there for you or for the reporters.

The microphone is set up for Jiang, who's a full head shorter than you. You shift it carefully. It's another moment you don't have to focus directly on the crowd. You put your feet squarely below your hips, and then you look up.

“Hi,” you say. “So. I'm, uh, not from Legal.”

Scattered, nervous laughter.

“I won't take up much of your time,” you say. “You're all here because a Mr. Peter Bradshaw came forward last night with information regarding the Winter Soldier's whereabouts. Specifically, he pointed to Jim Bauer of Stark Industries.” You clear your throat. “Mr. Bradshaw's correct. I was the Winter Soldier.”

The room erupts into chaos. Flashbulbs. A solid wall of sound. You can hear questions being shouted at you, but you can't see who's asking them. The security guards step a little closer. You look straight ahead and wait for the roar to die down. There's a clock on the opposite wall. You watch the second hand. Two and a half minutes pass before the crowd realizes you won't speak until they're quiet.

When the room is silent, you look away from the clock.

“I was captured by HYDRA in 1944,” you say. “They sent me on my first mission in 1951. I was owned by a Russian branch until 1989, at which point I was sold to the US branch headed by Alexander Pierce. Thanks to the actions of Captain America and his team, I was able to escape on April 4th, 2014, following the collapse of Project Insight.”

The cue cards shake in your hand. You swap them to your left and press the right to the podium, flat.

“I went into hiding for several days after my escape. I was unable to eat, and I had trouble remembering anything for longer than a few minutes. I was very confused. On April 8th, circumstances forced me to remove my prosthetic arm and seek outside help. I was initially assisted by Major Wilson, Agent Barton, and Captain Rogers, and later, Mr. Stark. Dr. Djenebou Traoré performed surgery on April 10th to remove HYDRA trackers from my body. On April 11th, she discovered that I was suffering from severe brain damage caused by years of mind-wiping procedures and repeated cryogenic storage. In late 2015, I was well enough to start working in the new prosthetics division of Stark Industries, under the observation of Mr. Stark and Dr. Traoré.”

You lean away from the mic to breathe; you lean back in. The room is silent as the grave without your voice filling it. “The records leaked in 2014 ain't—aren't complete. The Avengers have been destroying HYDRA bases in major cities since Project Insight failed, and they've found a lot more files. Many are on the Winter Soldier. Those files are being declassified and released this afternoon. The subject matter is graphic, much more so than the database files. I wish nobody had to see any of it, but it needs to go public. In addition to the recovered records, I've given Dr. Traoré permission to share my medical files. She thinks my case may give other neurologists insights into this type of brain damage—maybe to help people like me.”

You wipe your mouth with your hand. The scratch of your beard sounds too loud. 

“In some ways, I'm grateful that HYDRA was so thorough about their records,” you say. “The files are hideous, but. It means that I get to give a press conference instead of defending myself to a grand jury. Those materials make it very clear that—that they had no reason to employ those methods if I was enjoying my work. They had to erase me. They had to make me forget I was a person. I never wanted to hurt people. I didn't—” You stop. “I didn't choose any of this.” You hope your voice sounds less shaky than it feels in your throat. “I didn't choose to be a soldier. I didn't choose to be captured, tortured—forced to do the things I did. I just wanted to go home.”

You're deviating from the cue cards, but you know what you have to do. How to finish. The reason you couldn't let Jiang speak in your place. What he couldn't say.

“It's not my place to atone for the people HYDRA made me kill,” you say. “The experts tell me that it's not my fault HYDRA turned me into a weapon. But it's hard to—really believe that. I don't remember many of my missions, not in detail, not usually. My memories of the day the helicarriers fell are very clear. I remember the deaths of Agent Olsen, Agent Huang, Agent Ferguson, and Agent Hastings. It feels like my responsibility that they never got to go home to their families. So—it wasn't my choice, and apologies won't bring them back. There's no compensation in the world that'll ever be enough. But it's all I can offer. Some closure, maybe. If nothing else, I know what that's like. To want closure.”

You want to look down, but you force your chin up.

“I'm sorry,” you say. “I'm so sorry.”

You almost turn to go, but you glance off-stage first. In the wings, Monica from PR is gesturing. She taps her wrist, then holds out her hands. The left out flat, the right just one finger. You frown at her, and then: you get it. You nod. You turn back to the mic. It takes you two tries to get words out.

“I'm, uh, being told I have a few minutes for questions,” you say. “If anyone—”

Hands fly up. It's suddenly very hard to breathe.

You point to a man near the front: middle-aged, distinguished, salt-and-pepper beard.

“How much of your memory have you retained?” he asks. Quickly, as if to clarify what he means: “Any remaining neurological issues?”

“It's not wholesale amnesia, but I don't have much,” you admit. “My childhood is mostly gone, and anything after 1945 is pretty foggy and—muddled up. The war's still clear. No problems with memory retention these days, now that I've gone a few years without being wiped, but I do have language overlap sometimes. Confusion. Panic attacks.”

A man with tattoos on his hands: “Did you really kill President Kennedy?”

You shake your head. “No, that's a rumour. HYDRA records state I was in cryo at the time. I'm afraid it's a mystery for the ages.”

An older woman: “Were you self aware as the Winter Soldier?”

“That's a difficult question, ma'am,” you say, to give yourself a moment to think. “I remember—being afraid, a lot. I guess that means I had some sense of myself. That I could be hurt. I guess that's why it worked so well, even if I didn't think of myself as a person.”

You point to a young woman in yellow. You glance at Monica. She gives you a thumbs-up, and then taps her wrist. _Last one_.

“Is Jim Bauer an alias?” the woman asks.

Your breath leaps out of your throat. The microphone hisses. It feels like there's a small bird trapped in your chest, frantic, battering its wings against your ribs. You can almost feel its claws. The desperation. And then, like a clap: it's gone. Flying free. You rest your hands on the podium's lip. For a moment, your real fingers don't shake.

“Yes,” you say. You tell yourself: breathe. Breathe. “My real identity is, um—well known. It was decided I should take on an alias for my safety. Truth is, part of the reason I was able to escape from HYDRA is that Captain Rogers recognized me and tried to help me. I served with him during the war.”

You breathe in. You breathe out.

You look into the nearest camera.

“My name,” you say, “Is James Buchanan Barnes.”

 

* * *

 

You manage to get off the stage without a hitch, but you stumble in the wings. Monica almost has to catch you.

“You did great,” she says, her hands on your elbows. “You did really good. Are you okay?”

“N-n-no.” You clamp your teeth together, but they won't stop chattering. “I'm just—just give me a minute.”

“Sure, sure. It's over, you're okay.” She grips your elbows hard, grounding you. “Captain Rogers is here. Do you want someone to fetch him?”

“Steve?” you ask dumbly. You shake your head hard. A strand of hair falls out of your bun; tickles your neck. “Where is he?”

Monica takes you to the green room where they did your screen makeup earlier. The ephemera has been cleared away, but it's still cramped. Too much furniture, like it doubles as a storage closet.

Steve isn't the only one there. Tony, Pepper, Natalia, Clint, Sam, and Djene are waiting too, sitting on random recliners and wooden chairs older than you. Steve standing in the middle. He looks up when you come in: wide eyes. You half-leap, half-collapse towards him. Your arms around each other. You're not sure who clings tighter, you or Steve.

“Jesus, Buck,” he says in your ear. “Where'd that come from, huh? I thought you were gonna let Mr. Li handle it. I just about keeled over.”

“ _You_ just about—that was the scariest fucking thing I've had to do in my whole damn life,” you say, close to hysterics. You clamp down on a laugh that you know will come out unhinged.

“Bullshit,” says Steve. “Can't have been as bad as tightrope-walking over a factory on fire.”

“I'd walk over a whole lake of fire,” you say fervently. “Ten lakes. No more public speaking. Christ.” You hold him at arm's length. “The hell are you _doing_ here?”

“Wanted to be here for you when it was over,” says Steve. He shifts his grip to your hands and squeezes. “I have to—whatever comes next, I'm here for you. Whatever you need. If it goes to shit and you wanna run, I'll follow. Ain't a place you could go I wouldn't follow.”

“I know, pal,” you say.

“I love you,” says Steve. He lets go of you and shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, hunching in on himself. “That was the—just the bravest thing. Made me feel like a coward, sitting on my heels back here. I can't—Buck, before anything else happens—”

You blink, and Steve is—

Steve is on one knee.

With a _ring box in his hands_.

White noise. Tinnitus in your ears. Or: your bones struck like a bell. A twisting under your breastbone like he's put his hand in and yanked. The whole world narrows down to Steve, and then widens. Too fast. For a moment you're sure you're going to pass out. It takes you a few seconds to convince yourself that you won't.

You very slowly turn your head to stare at Natalia.

“You told him,” you say, but her eyes are wide as dinner plates, and she shakes her head. Next to her, Tony looks like he wants to get popcorn. Djene's hands are over her mouth. Sam and Clint are grinning like loons. Pepper is clearly about to start crying.

“Buck?” says Steve, confused. Still on the ground.

You snap into motion, wrestling with your shirt cuff. “Rogers,” you growl; the button pops off to god knows where, “I cannot fucking believe—” and you're yanking up the cuff and popping the compartment, fumbling the ring, almost—Christ—dropping it on the floor, too fast: “The one time you aren't _late_ —”

You get the stupid thing out of the stupid cloth and drop to your knees. Both of them, not one like you're supposed to, but—oh for god's sake, it doesn't matter. Steve staring at you like you've got three eyes.

“Marry me, you asshole,” you say, and shove the ring in his face.

Steve blinks.

Blinks some more.

He launches himself at you like he's covering you from a bomb. You fall over backwards, the wind driven out of you. You smack your head on the door. Your arms full of supersoldier. Steve's knee almost turns you into a soprano. You accidentally kick Tony in the shin. It's a minor miracle you manage to keep hold of the ring.

“Should we just assume that was a yes, then?” Natalia asks, but you're laughing too hard to answer.

 

* * *

 

“That was the dumbest thing I've ever seen,” says Tony.

“Shut up,” says Steve. His blush might be burned in: two warm sweeps on his cheekbones, a band across his nose. An enormous goofy grin plastered on his face.

“No, seriously, I demand a re-do, that was _awful_. I'm ashamed. I'm personally offended.”

“Ignore him,” says Pepper. “He doesn't think a proposal counts unless it's accompanied by fireworks and robots.”

“They were sparklers, and DUM-E is basically your poor bullied adoptive nephew, you can't say no to that face,” says Tony, before Djene and Pepper haul him bodily out of the green room. From down the hall you hear: “You're not allowed to honeymoon in Jersey, Rogers!”

You turn to Steve, eyebrows up. “ _Did_ you want to honeymoon in Jersey?”

“Did you want a _honeymoon_?” Steve counters.

“Ain't a dealbreaker. We were gonna travel anyway. When'd you want to get the license?”

Steve looks at his phone. “Well, the City Clerk's office closes at 4:30, so...”

Natalia puts her head in her hands.

“Wait-wait-wait _hold up_ ,” says Clint. “The paparazzi's about to descend like seagulls on a burger, you can't just waltz over to the Marriage Bureau!”

“Uh, yeah, it's gonna be all running-of-the-bulls in about five minutes,” says Sam, “So unless you've got an exit plan...”

“Does a helicopter on the roof count?” Steve asks. When Sam flings his hands up and Clint stares at him: “What? Enhanced hearing! I bet Tony's about ten seconds from—” All of your phones ping. You look: _Get to the choppa!_

Steve says, “See?”

“I hate all of you,” Clint grumbles. “I quit. I'm too old for this shit. I bet there's less drama on the Renaissance Faire circuit.”

“Aww, don't be sour, Barton,” you say, ruffling his hair. “We'll let you dress up as Cupid for the ceremony.”

“You know, I think I liked you better when you were monosyllabic and crying all the time,” says Clint.

But he's signing _togas are great!_ behind Steve's back, so all is right with the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One chapter left to go, folks! Thanks so much for reading!


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You both go quiet. You follow his gaze outside. There's some kind of group session being held on the lawn, in the sunlight. Three women, five men, all ages. Some of them sit quietly. Others twitch and fidget. You can't hear their voices, but you can hear a buzzing. Bumblebees in the trellis. One of them bumps the window and leaves a little snowflake of pollen.

###### JAMES BARNES: I JUST WANTED TO LIVE AGAIN

New York Horizon  
May 03, 2021  
Christine Everhart

_James Buchanan Barnes has a complicated history. Raised in Prohibition-Era Brooklyn, drafted at twenty-four and shipped to Italy, he would later serve alongside Captain America as a Howling Commando in the European Theater. After his tragically early death, his body was believed lost in the Austrian Alps. Until recently, he remained a minor presence in textbooks and the occasional piece of historical fiction._

_The world was shocked this February by the revelation that James Barnes was not only alive, but had suffered for decades as the Winter Soldier, a shadowy, almost mythical figure revealed to be flesh during the catastrophic fallout of Project Insight. Today, when he isn't running his dogs through Central Park or horsing around with off-duty members of the Avengers, the world's longest serving prisoner of war makes prosthetics for veterans like himself. Barnes speaks candidly with Christine Everhart about his recovery, his daily life, and his recent marriage to Steve Rogers._

  


**CE** : I have to ask—my managers said you requested me specifically. Why was that?

 **JBB** : Well, Ms. Potts recommended you, and I really enjoyed the series you did on DC. You were even-handed, but you weren't afraid to ask the tough questions, and you were fair to Steve. That counts for a lot.

 **CE** : Brownie points?

 **JBB** : Absolutely. Your recent piece on Eli Bradley was a lot of fun, too. Isn't he great?

 **CE** : He had me in stitches. I wasn't expecting the new Captain America to be such a clown—he looks so serious in his promo photos.

 **JBB** : I'm adopting him. He's the awful little brother Steve really deserves.

 **CE** : Now, speaking of photo ops—

 **JBB** : Oh no...

 **CE** : You recently did a shoot with Michael Stone, whose _Ironheart_ series features amputee veterans posing semi-nude. They're a beautiful argument to the idea that someone with prosthetic limbs is somehow 'less' than any other person. What was that like?

 **JBB** : Cold. Hey, don't laugh! I get cold really easily, I kept asking them to turn the heat up, it was ridiculous. No, but it was fun. Weird, but fun. I got a new respect for professional models.

 **CE** : Was it difficult, revealing that much of yourself? You experienced horrific dehumanization, that must have had an effect on your body image.

 **JBB** : It was surprisingly easy, until Mike asked me to remove my prosthetic. You've probably seen the conference footage by now? That's not real, the stump. We wanted to make sure that if I ever had to take my arm off in public, it wouldn't look like the Winter Soldier's socket. Too recognizable. Um—I don't think I've explicitly talked about what it was like to take the metal arm off? You read the secondary files, I'm assuming.

 **CE** : What I could stomach. They're pretty awful, if you don't mind me saying.

 **JBB** : No, they are. So you might've seen that I got metal around my left collarbone, my left scapula, some of my ribs, and in my spine. That was to support the weight of the arm after they screwed it into my bones.

 **CE** : So when you had to remove it in 2014...

 **JBB** : I had to—yeah.

 **CE** : Oh, good god.

 **JBB** : Plus the scarring is kind of intense, they sort of just, you know, shoved the socket in there and hoped for the best. I didn't think I could go through with it, actually, when Mike asked me. And then I started— _[laughs]_ —I started crying? Which was really embarrassing? But I told him to keep going, and it was good. It was good. I felt better in my skin after that. We couldn't use any of those photos because, obviously, I'm just. _[gestures to face]_ A total mess. But I got copies.

Way I feel these days is complicated, I guess. My body was just the extension of a gun for years, I didn't have any sense of it. It took a long time for me to learn how to treat it right. They fed me through an NG tube, so food was an issue too, for a while. Sometimes I still have to eat real slow and careful so I don't get sick or just treat it as fuel. Recovering from this kind of thing is like...you got to be real mindful. It's too easy to fall into old habits. But, hey, I got a fantastic therapist. That helps a lot.

So does posing in the buff, I guess.

 **CE** : And you've never posed nude before? You're a natural.

 **JBB** : Well, not in public. What—my husband's an artist! What do you think I do on weekends?

 **CE** : I don't know, but I think you just improved a few people's daydreams. On the topic of Captain Rogers, I'm sure my readers are dying to know: how did that happen? Is this an epic romance spanning a century?

 **JBB** : Christ no.

 **CE** : Really!

 **JBB** : I mean, maybe? Remember, I got, like, practically zero memories of anything before the war, so I could've been head-over-heels for Steve, but I never told him, so we don't know. But really, I don't think so. I can't even tell you the when, it's not like—there wasn't ever a moment where we went, okay, we were friends, but now we're something else. It was a natural progression. It ain't one or the other. We're just friends who happen to be in love, I guess.

 **CE** : And now you're married.

 **JBB** : And now we're married.

 **CE** : I was going to ask if it was extra-special for you, considering the time you both grew up in, but if you can't remember...

 **JBB** : Yeah, there wasn't any extra significance for me. I mean, there was, for personal reasons, but not on account of where I was raised. But for Steve? Wow. I ain't ever seen a happier man. He said it was worth getting uprooted, for this.

 **CE** : Tabloids joke that you and Captain Rogers are 'senior citizens', but that's not true, is it? You actually have relatively little lived experience.

 **JBB** : That's right. I'm—oh god. Are you going to make me to do the math?

 **CE** : Impress me.

 **JBB** : Well, since you ask so nicely. I'm, okay, chronologically I'm a hundred and five, and Steve's a hundred and three. Actual birthdays—he's easier to figure out, he's turning 37 in July. I should've turned 28 in 1945, so we counted my 29th in 2015, which makes me 35. Which is bizarre, because I'm actually older than him. Biologically, it's just impossible to figure out. We asked JARVIS to calculate based on how many days I was out of cryo between '45 and Insight, but we know that cryo ages the cells some arbitrary amount every time it's used, based on, like, cortisol levels and all that, so near as we can figure, I'm anywhere between 39 and 46.

 **CE** : No grey hairs, though.

 **JBB** : Not yet.

 **CE** : I realize this may be a difficult question to answer, but what was it like to find out who you were?

 **JBB** : It was rough. Actually, I want to give a shout-out to the Smithsonian, because if it hadn't been for the Captain America exhibit they were featuring at the time, I don't know what would've happened. But—Christ. Do you know how weird it is to have no identity, none at all, and walk into a museum and see your face on a giant mural? Like—wow, I'm not only somebody, I'm _somebody_. You know?

 **CE** : I can't even imagine.

 **JBB** : I didn't start remembering then, either, so it was really strange. It was only later I started getting things back. Which was uncomfortable, but kind of exciting. Like waking up and realizing you'd been asleep, and then doing it again, and again...

 **CE** : You've said that your memories of the war are your clearest ones. Why is that, do you think?

 **JBB** : My neurologist and my therapist have their theories. I mean, the brain—it doesn't localize memories, right? It sort of spreads the job around, so you can take out fairly significant pieces without turning someone into a vegetable. My lesions haven't disappeared, even with the healing factor, but I've got a lot back, so obviously it's compensating in there. You can see the change in my MRIs over time. But we think...well, the first time I got the serum was when I was captured in 1943. Steve's serum gave him a photographic memory, but they were messing with my brain at the time, so it's possible the serum only effected my memory going forward. 

So, serum, but no wipes from '43 to '44, and then probable brain damage in the fall, and then seventy years of cryo and rolling wipes...it probably bears mentioning my memories are clearer the longer I stayed out of cryo on a mission. Stuff got time to be written to disk—so to speak.

 **CE** : Were you reluctant to go public?

 **JBB** : Very. I never would've come forward if if Mr. Bradshaw hadn't, you know. _[pauses]_ The people I've been—Sergeant Barnes, the Winter Soldier—I just wanted to put them to bed. Maybe that's selfish, I dunno. I just wanted to live again, live my own life. I'm not them anymore, not really. If I feel close to any of them at all, actually, it's little Jimmy Barnes, who drew rocket ships in his composition book and loved robots. I think that kid would be real proud of where I ended up.

 **CE** : You might not know this, but you've become something of a role model for trauma survivors.

 **JBB** : _[laughs]_ What?

 **CE** : No, really. You lived through the most unimaginable violation of your autonomy, recovered your identity after years of torture, and managed to find peace. You're an inspiration to them. What would you say to those people about recovery?

 **JBB** : Uh, wow, no pressure. Um—I'd say that it's hard, recovery, it's the hardest thing you'll ever do. But it's worth it. Every day you kick entropy in the face, that's a victory, even if it's just getting out of bed. Get help; let people help you. Sometimes it seems like you'll never remember how to laugh, or feel happy again, but you can. And you will.

 **CE** : Thank you.

  


_After our interview, Barnes handed me a glossy 8x10 photograph and said, “You can publish this with the rest of it. I wasn't sure if I'd wanna, after, but I think somebody might need to see it. After what you said, I think—it might help some people.”_

_The picture is from the Stone shoot, one of many never shown to the public. In it, Barnes has clearly been weeping: his complexion is blotchy and his eyes are red-rimmed. The first thing the viewer notices, however, isn't his face. Without his faux stump and self-designed prosthetic, Barnes's left shoulder is a ruin, a Mars landscape of terrible scarring surrounding a deep-set metal socket. It looks incredibly painful, and it's hard to imagine anyone surviving the process that installed it. Despite a nakedness that goes beyond merely being unclothed, Barnes's pose is confident, his chin raised, his spine straight. His eyes hold a challenge._ I had strings, but now I'm free, _they seem to say_.

There are no strings on me. 

 

* * *

 

“You forgot to carry the one,” says Tony over your shoulder.

You scan the page anxiously, and then you turn to glare at him. He raises his eyebrows.

“Not that this isn't nauseatingly adorable,” says Tony, “But why is the Bean helping you with your acceleration vector calculations?”

You put your hand on Sabine in her sling. Djene tried to show you how to tie the kanga on your back, but you like to keep her where you can look at her. Besides, you're missing an important piece of anatomy for the other style. You're pretty sure the kanga would slip right off.

“Mariam and Djene stole Aimee for retail therapy,” you say, “And babies aren't supposed to go out in public till they've had their first vaccinations.”

“What, really?”

“Don't look at me.” You make a helpless gesture. “According to that one documentary, I was born on the kitchen floor of a tenement. Pretty sure I licked a cockroach or twelve.”

“There are so many things wrong with that entire statement, I'm not even going to start,” says Tony. “You are clearly the best possible babysitter. Enjoy your tiny assistant.”

“Ignore him,” you tell Sabine. She squints at you unevenly. A tiny grumpy owl in her purple wrap. “He was raised by robots.”

“I'd be better socialized, if that was the case,” says Tony.

“I shan't argue with that, Sir,” says JARVIS.

Tony blows a raspberry at the ceiling. “Hey, have you heard the latest? There's a Twitter campaign running, Nigel Sullivan wants to do a movie about your life.”

You pull a face. “Ain't that the guy behind _Guts I_ through _XIII_? Wow, no thanks.”

“Yeah, PR will squish it if it gets too big.” Tony drops a wrench, and you think Sabine is going to cry, but she just scrunches up her little face. The queen is displeased. You grin. Tony adds, “If somebody _was_ going to make a biopic, who would you want directing it?”

“Dunno,” you say. “John Kurosawa did that one about Oppenheimer couple'a years ago, I liked that one. Real respectful.”

“You're so boring,” Tony says wonderingly. “Not Virginia Parr? Not Lytton Matheson? You don't want _gritty action adventure_?” But he's clearly teasing.

“I'm an old fogey,” you pretend to groan. “I'm a total fuddy-duddy, the most boring, put me out of my misery.”

“Whine, whine, whine, ever since the baby came...”

Ruth and Mohan take that opportunity to come back from their snack run. Ruth shoves two doughnuts in Tony's open mouth and runs away. Tony makes grabby hands for the rest of the box. Mohan more sedately puts a bag of rugelach on your bench on his way past.

“I gets no respect,” says Tony, spraying crumbs.

“Poor sad panda.”

He throws a hologram at your head.

 

* * *

 

“Was she okay?” Aimee asks as you untie the sling. Sabine makes unhappy noises about the transfer.

“She was a peach,” you say. “I'm sorta suspicious you traded her in for a small alien when I wasn't looking.”

“She likes you,” says Aimee. Mariam boops her niece's nose. Sabine pulls her _you have displeased me, minion_ scrunchy-face.

“James Barnes, Baby Whisperer,” Tony offers.

“I'm sure you helped,” says Aimee.

“It _was_ pretty funny watching him try not to cuss for two hours,” you say.

Aimee snorts. “Swearing doesn't count until she starts babbling, technically, but it's good to start the habit early.”

“Clint wants to start teaching her baby sign language, but I told him that's not going to work under her language centres develop,” Mariam adds. “Which is, like, six months. Unless she's some kind of ridiculous overachiever.”

“Traoré genes and supersoldier daycare?” Tony rolls his eyes. “She'll be in here splicing power cables before she can walk.”

“Or, despite all of our crazy predictions, she'll end up a totally normal, totally average kid,” you say. “Wouldn't that be a relief.”

“Jesus, don't, that's terrifying,” says Tony. “I don't think I could handle that. Why would you even.”

“Hey, I spent every free hour here and I turned out normal!” says Aimee. “I'm not a weirdo genius or an overachiever.”

“You're a prodigy tattoo artist who speaks four languages and listens to elitist death metal,” says Tony. “Who listens to elitist death metal _ironically_. You don't even _like_ death metal. Weirdo genius. I rest my case.”

“I knew I should've gone to med school,” Aimee mutters, and Mariam cackles.

 

* * *

 

“Winter Soldier: My Name Is James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve reads aloud, in his bond-peddling voice. “Why is this _still_ trending? Also, shouldn't it be 'James Buchanan Barnes: I Was The Winter Soldier'?”

“I don't think the Daily Mail is too het up about identity semantics,” you say from the sofa. “Get off the internet before you Hulk out, Rogers.”

“I'm checkin' my emails,” says Steve defensively. “I've got Google alerts, so sue me.”

“Ignore 'em,” you say. “Just, categorically. Unlike Monica, you don't get paid to wade through that shit.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Steve grumbles. “Oh, hey, we've been invited to visit an elementary school.”

“Cool,” you say. You turn a page.

And then: your brain catches up with your mouth. “ _We_?”

“Yeah, they want both of us.” Steve turns, grinning. “Whaddaya say, Buck? Want to pal around with a bunch of grade-schoolers for an afternoon?”

Which is how you find yourself reading _Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew_ to a pie-eyed circle of ten-year-olds. You're not sure if they're more excited about you or the book. It's a pretty great book. On the other side of the room, Steve's group is making superhero masks out of felt. You questioned the logic of romanticizing a violent job, at first, but Steve gave a talk about being an everyday hero earlier. So: you guess it's all right.

“How did it feel when you hurt your friend?” a girl asks when you're done, and, okay, maybe it wasn't entirely the book. You glance at Miss Barclay, but she nods encouragingly.

“Later? Terrible,” you say. “But at the time, I didn't understand. Like—you know how if a dog gets hurt a lot by someone mean, eventually it'll just bite anybody, even somebody who's trying to be nice to it? That was me. I was just awful scared.”

“My dad had nightmares after he came home from Iraq,” a boy says. “Do you have nightmares?”

“All the time,” you say, “But sometimes I'm grateful, because they remind me it's over. Your dad must be real glad to be home with somebody who cares about him so much.”

“Can we see your arm?” a girl asks, so you take it off and open up the panels to show them how it works. Some of them come up and touch your faux stump. You close the arm up and let them pass it around. They curl your fingers and poke each other. You take a moment to stand back with the teacher.

“I wasn't sure how this would fly,” you say. “My history's not exactly cuddly.”

“When I was a kid, we had guests from the senior care home come and visit,” says Miss Barclay. “One of them was an ex-lumberjack from Canada with no legs. Bob. He told us the whole story about how a tree fell on him and crushed them so bad they had to be amputated—how he could see all the bone, blood everywhere—he was a great storyteller. You know how kids love gore. Thing was, though, it was another guy on the team, ignoring regs. He was trying to kill Bob because he was scared Bob would take his job. Bob went on to become a pretty famous writer and made ten times more than that guy ever would. It was an important lesson to learn.”

“What's the lesson, though?” you ask. “Don't be a jerk? The world's a dangerous place?”

“We can be more than the things that happened to us,” says Miss Barclay. “Hey, no, Joseph, that arrangement of fingers isn't nice, pass it along.”

Miss Barclay picks two kids to help put your prosthetic back on. You show them the calibration tests you run on your fingers every morning. You lift six kids, swinging off your arms, shrieking laughter. You look up to catch Steve looking at you across the room. Hearts in his eyes, like a total cheeseball. You stick your tongue out at him.

“Let's say thank-you to Bucky for coming,” says Miss Barclay. The chorus is so loud it hurts your ears. You wonder if the teachers wear surreptitious hearing protection.

You crouch down. “Hugs?”

You get dog-piled by about sixteen children and their three hundred pointy elbows.

Worth it.

 

* * *

 

“Ready yet?”

“Just a minute!” Clint yells back. Lucky, Josie, and Clara are clustered around the bathroom door, ears perked. You sigh and kick the wall. There's already a scuff; yours doesn't show.

Clint comes out in a brown wig, a fake moustache, a plaid shirt, and combat boots.

“Were you going for confused Canadian or eighties porn actor?” you ask.

Clint puts his hands on his hips and puffs out the moustache. “Yeah, because you're looking so much better, Mr. Smith.”

“You realize they're gonna recognize us in about five seconds on account of the dogs, right?”

“Whatever,” says Clint, walking off without you. The canine contingent trails after him. “You're just jealous I'm a better spy than you are.”

Downstairs, though, Clint hangs a right instead of a left.

“Let's go to Detmold instead,” he suggests. “Less chance of being recognized, we haven't been there in a month or something. And there's an actual dog park.”

You let the dogs off their leashes and join Clint on a bench. It's threatening rain, but you think it'll hold off until tonight. Clara immediately sprints off to make friends with a whole pack of squeaking chihuahuas. Lucky explores good smells. Josie follows Lucky so close she almost trips on his back feet.

Clint tells you jokes in Russian; you respond in ASL. You swap for a while. He makes you translate the new Taylor Swift song into sign, so you can't pretend you don't have it memorized. It turns into a minor wrestling-match-slash-slappy-fight when you start insulting his dog. You only stop because you're worried you'll break the mossy old bench. Tourists pass through, but nobody points their phone at you. It's a nice change.

“What the fuck,” somebody says.

Clint groans. You turn. A handsome white woman in leggings and a purple sweater is walking towards Clint like he owes her money. She stops at kicking distance and crosses her arms.

“Why are you dressed like an eighties porn actor?” she asks.

You laugh. You elbow him. “See? I told you.”

Clint casts his eyes to the heavens.

“Kate Bishop,” he says, flapping his arm towards her. “The Better Hawkeye. You guys met, right? When you were, you know, not you. Cover you.”

“Couple'a times, but it was ages ago,” you say. You offer your hand. “James Barnes. Nice to meet you again, ma'am.”

Kate looks at Clint but points at you. “I like this one. You can keep this one.” She shakes your hand. “I see you in the gym sometimes with Nell. You're, like, 110% less scrubby than when you started, rock on.”

“Internationally famed assassin to aikido noob,” says Clint. “Moving up in the world, Barnes.”

“Yeah, pretty soon I'll be able to toss you off the roof,” you say.

“Sam'll catch me. It'll be fun. Saturday morning?”

“You got yourself a date.”

“Ugh, boys,” says Kate.

“I'm fifty-one!” Clint protests.

“I'm a hundred and five,” you say.

“Men are boys until the day they shuffle off their mortal coil,” says Kate. “Later, losers. Enjoy your dick-measuring contest.”

“Bye, Katie-Kate!”

“Afternoon, Miss Bishop!”

“She's gonna kill you for that,” Clint whispers.

“She won't,” you whisper back. “She likes me. She said.”

You and Clint watch the dogs for a while in silence. Clara is determined to make friends with every dog in a three-hundred-yard radius. Josie has managed to leave a two foot gap between herself and Lucky's butt. Progress! You're very proud.

“She's taking over for me when I leave next year,” says Clint suddenly.

“You what?” You boggle at him. “Did Steve trigger some kinda exodus?”

“Ehh, I was thinking about it already. I'm getting too old for this cowboy shit, you know? My concussion syndrome has concussion syndrome.”

“Wow,” you say. You sit back on the bench and look at the sky. “Pretty soon, there's gonna be a whole new generation of Avengers. S'gonna be weird.”

“You seen Tony's new plans for a spaceship?”

“I think he's getting bored with prosthetics now that the rest of us can pick up the slack,” you say. “Wants to go to Mars. Set up a habitation dome or something, god knows.”

“Hey, I'd go. C'mon— _space_.”

You think about the chubby little kid you can only remember through Steve's eyes. Black-and-white photographs. That composition book, rockets and aliens doodled in the margins. Stacks and stacks of _Weird Tales_ in the museum basement, JAMES B BARNES in blocky copperplate on a hundred covers. Steve says you used to take your dates to physics lectures and science conventions. Would little Jimmy have wanted to go to space? Did Bucky dream about visiting the stars?

_Well, James—what do you think?_

“Yeah,” you say. “Me too.”

 

* * *

 

The building is beautiful.

Pale wood floors, cream walls, faux-impressionist paintings. Lots of picture windows, letting in natural light and leaf-dappled shadows. It's soothing without being—as Darcy would put it—godawfully twee. The staff seem cheerful and well-organized. You half-expected it to smell like a hospital as you walk through it, but it doesn't. Lemony wood polish and laundry detergent. Baked goods.

“George?” the orderly says. “You've got a visitor, hon.”

Someone says “thanks” from inside the room. The orderly waves you through and shuts the door behind you. Under the biggest window, there's a young man with curly blonde hair. Reading. Holding the book in his left hand. The right is hidden behind his thigh, and then: you see the metal hooks. You know his aunt made a GoFundMe page to pay for the rehab facility. There must not have been enough left over to afford a better prosthetic.

George doesn't look up until you sit in the chair opposite. When you take off your hat and glasses, he drops his book. You pick it up and hand it to him. _The Collected Short Stories of Ray Bradbury_. Something twists in your chest.

“Hi,” you say.

“Hi,” says George.

The smell of sweet peas from the trellis outside. You look at George. George looks at you. Fear, confusion, curiosity. You rehearsed what you wanted to say, but it's all fled your mind. Both of you, drawing blanks.

“I wanted to apologize,” you say finally. “I never learned how to disarm people without hurting them. I should've been more careful.”

“You did what you had to,” says George. “You didn't know what kind of powers I had. I was high as a kite, I was gunning for your boss—”

“Hey, you'd been through hell, and what I did just compounded all that. I'm so sorry.”

“Well. Thanks.” George fiddles with the cover of his book. “I, uh, saw you on the news. The press conference. While I was still in the hospital.”

You wince. “That couldn't've been fun.”

“No. Explained a few things, though,” he says. A hint of a smile, there and gone. “You've been through, you know. Too.”

“That's why Tony thought I should come talk to you,” you say. George flinches, almost imperceptibly. “Sorry, that's probably—thin ice.”

But George shakes his head. “No, I know that it was the drugs. Now. Paranoia and...anyway. I know there wasn't anything he could've done. But that doesn't make it easier. It's nice to have somebody to blame. Makes you feel better. But it doesn't _make_ it better. Grace's—still dead.”

“Yeah,” you say quietly. “I know.”

Suddenly, George animates. It makes him look about seventeen. He fumbles around in his pocket and brings out a wallet. “They keep our tech until we leave,” he explains, and it's not a wallet, it's a tiny album; “But we can have photos.”

He gives it to you. You open it.

“You're twins,” you realize. You flip the little plastic pages. A curvy woman with a mop of blonde curls. Grace with children. Grace with a horse. Grace making a silly face.

“Yeah,” says George. “She was amazing. She worked with disabled kids—therapy horses. That's Gizmo,” he says, pointing to a chunky dun horse with a black-and-white mane, “He's a Fjord. Like, ten feet wide. The kids love him. The organization has him now.”

“I'm sorry,” you say. You give him back the album. “It's not fair.”

“No,” says George. “It's not.”

You both go quiet. You follow his gaze outside. There's some kind of group session being held on the lawn, in the sunlight. Three women, five men, all ages. Some of them sit quietly. Others twitch and fidget. You can't hear their voices, but you can hear a buzzing. Bumblebees in the trellis. One of them bumps the window and leaves a little snowflake of pollen.

“I, uh, was alive when his first story came out,” you say. George looks at you, baffled. You tap the book. “Bradbury. I don't remember reading it, but Steve—Captain Rogers—says I bought everything he was published in. You like that stuff? Sci-fi?”

“Yeah,” says George. “They say writing's really good for recovery, so. I thought maybe I'd try it out? I don't know what else I'll do when I get out of here. Last job I had was a paper route when I was eighteen.”

“Actually—” You clear your throat. You look out the window. “It's funny, I been thinking of trying it out too. Except I ain't got a lot of free time. You know what I do for a living?” George nods. “Well, the interns are great and all, but what I could really use is an assistant. Someone to sort emails, streamline paperwork, extra set of hands.”

George stares at you.

“Offer's open,” you say. “Ain't a bribe. Ain't asking you to keep your mouth shut, and I'm certainly not trying to pay blood money for what happened to you or your sister. I really do need an assistant. And we got people who can help you manage your powers. Cafeteria's great. Gym facilities.” You spread your hands. “Free upgrades for life, so long as you don't mind being Guinea Pig #3.” You can tell he's trying to keep a poker face. You try to hit it out of the park: “I mean, you'd have to work around Tony, which is kind of like wrestling six toddlers in a trenchcoat, but—”

And George is laughing.

After a minute, he stops, and his brow furrows. “You said Mr. Stark _wanted_ you to talk to me? Does he. Know? That you're offering me a job?”

“ 'Course. They told you he dropped the charges, right?”

“And he's fine with, you know. The guy who tried to shoot him—working for him?”

“Tony took me in and gave me a job when he wasn't sure if I murdered his parents,” you say, shrugging. “My friend lets me hang out with her little baby even though I killed kids. Tower's full of forgiving people. We know what it's like to fuck up.”

You can see George is getting tired and overwhelmed, so you slip one of your cards into his book before you stand and head for the door. The smell of sweet peas follows you across the room. It's probably seeped into your clothes, like perfume. The dogs are going to go mental.

“Sergeant Barnes?”

“Bucky,” you say, turning. “It's Bucky, if we'll be working together, or James if that'll give you a stroke.”

“Bucky,” says George. “You said. At the press conference, you said—did you ever get closure? For anything?”

You walk back over to the window. Your hands in your pockets; your eyes on the little group outside. Stillness and motion. Bees in the trellis.

“No,” you say. “You think you get closure, and then one day, out of the blue, something reminds you of what happened to you and it all comes down on your head. Sometimes it sets you back, sometimes it doesn't. It ain't about forgetting. It ain't about getting even, either. It's not a point. It's a spiral. It's your whole life. Closure's about going to bed knowing you didn't make the world a worse place than it was yesterday, and then getting up and doing it again.”

You put your hand on his shoulder. Slowly: his arm coming up. The curve of his hooks resting against your knuckles, cold. His pulse under your palm.

“That's all, kid,” you say. “That's all.”

* * *

_finis._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Michael Stone and _Ironheart_ are fictional versions of Michael Stokes and his beautiful photography series, [Always Loyal](http://themighty.com/2015/07/2photographer-captures-confidence-of-wounded-veterans-in-new-book/) (mildly NSFW).
> 
> A [kanga](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/e5/52/b1/e552b1fd4340ffe67a4735098761c8eb.jpg), worn on the back.
> 
> Last but not least, if you haven't discovered [Nurk](http://www.amazon.com/Nurk-Strange-Surprising-Adventures-Somewhat/dp/0152063757/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1460161089&sr=8-1&keywords=nurk) yet, _get on that_.
> 
> And we're done, folks! There may or may not be more one-shots in this universe, but this wraps up the main story. Thank you so much to everyone who read, commented, kudos'd, or left me heartbreakingly sweet messages on Tumblr. I couldn't have done this without you guys. Gross grandpa kisses and cheek-pinches for everyone!
> 
> You can find me on Tumblr [here](http://magdaliny.tumblr.com), where I reblog pretty things, or [here](http://redstarwhitestar.tumblr.com), where I cry about superheroes.


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